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THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

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THE 
ADVENTURE OF LIFE 



BY 
ROBERT W. MACKENNA, M.A., M.D. 

Author of "The Adventure of Death" 



Grow old along with me I 

The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made : 

Our times are in His hand 

Who saith, " A whole I planned, 
" Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid! " 

Browning: Rabbi Ben Ezra. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1919 

All rights reserved 



PREFACE 

The life of every one who will read these words has 
been influenced in some way by the war. It has rudely 
broken many old and sacred ties ; it has touched with 
calamitous finger innumerable homes ; it has altered life- 
long habits and shattered many a fondly cherished be- 
lief. It has introduced a ferment into human thought, 
and men who had accepted without questioning and 
with little understanding the mysteries of existence are 
finding their beliefs challenged and their faith shaken by 
the iron discipline of events. They are asking, as they 
watch civilization ablaze in the furnace, if there is any 
answer to the riddle of the universe; if there is any 
righteousness in the scheme of things ; if there is any 
purpose in life: or if it is all nothing but an ugly de- 
lusion or a hideous dream. 

There is a danger that some will find in a crude doc- 
trine of materialism the sole resting-place for their feet ; 
but the materialistic creed is a creed of pessimism — a 
foundation from which no useful and enduring edifice 
of belief can ever arise. That humanity may spring 
from the ashes of civilization with vigor renewed and 
vision purified, we must cultivate an invincible spirit of 
optimism. For such an attitude of mind we have good 
grounds : we have none for the sterilizing dogmas of ma- 
terialism. 

It is given to the physician to see much of human life. 
He has many opportunities of beholding its sordidness. 
He is the daily witness of its high heroism. He is con- 



viii PREFACE 

stantly faced by its problems; he can never get away 
from its mysteries ; his knowledge of its adaptations is 
intimate, and though there is still much about it that is 
hidden from his inquiring eyes, he is aware of some of 
its potentialities. 

Personally, I cannot bring myself to believe that life 
can ever be explained in the terms of sheer materialism, 
and reduced to mere chemical equations, or expressed 
entirely in the language of the physical or physiologi- 
cal laboratory. The indomitable logic of facts has 
driven me to the conclusion that behind all and above 
all there is an intelligent and beneficent Mind, imma- 
nent in nature and in the life of man. If this is true 
we have good reason to hail the future with a glad con- 
fidence. 

The chapters which follow have been written in the 
hope that they may help to illumine with a ray of light, 
however feeble, the clouds of perplexity with which 
many an earnest seeker after the truth finds himself 
surrounded. 

The book is neither a scientific monograph nor a phil- 
osophical treatise, and will be easily comprehended by 
all. As far as possible I have endeavored to avoid the 
use of technical terms. My aim has been to impress 
upon all who care to read the wonder and the har- 
mony of life, and the complete interdependence that 
subsists between all forms of life. I believe that the 
goal of Nature is Life; the aim of Life is the develop- 
ment of Intelligence, and the object of Intelligence is a 
knowledge of God. 

It is not my desire to disarm criticism, but some of 
the defects in the chapters which follow — of whose 
existence I am fully conscious — are due to the condi- 
tions under which the book has been composed. It was 
begun on a winter night in a little bell-tent in the 



PREFACE ix 

North of France, within sight of a horizon lit by the 
flash of heavy guns. More than once the hurricane- 
lamp had to be extinguished lest its faint light, illu- 
minating the canvas walls, should attract the eye of 
some questing enemy aviator and tempt him to hurl his 
bombs upon the sleeping hospital. It was completed in 
a tent still within the zone of war, but somewhat more 
remote from actual hostilities. Libraries are no part 
of the equipment of a war hospital, and I have had no 
books of reference to fall back upon except a few smug- 
gled over in my kit-bag. Napoleon is said to have 
carried a library through all his campaigns. An 
officer of the R.A.M.C. who would dare to attempt to 
emulate that great example would have his plans rudely 
frustrated by the Embarkation Officer. But the cir- 
cumstances which made the task difficult in one direc- 
tion made it easier in another, for the facts of war have 
supplied me with an unfailing source of illustration. 

Robert W. Mackenna. 
B. E. F., France. 
March, 1918. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Universality of Life 1 

II The Origin of Life 9 

III The Origin of Man 25 

IV The Dominant Role of Intelligence in 

the Evolution of Man 37 

V The Protection of Life 53 

VI Heredity and Environment 74 

VII Man's Freedom, and Man's Soul ... 96 

VIII What is Life? 109 

IX The Phenomenon of Pain 129 

X The Mechanism of Pain 144 

XI The Mystery of Pain and Suffering . . 151 

XII The Discipline of Sickness 171 

XIII Love and Marriage 183 

XIV Work 195 

XV The Revelation of God to Man: Religion 210 

XVI The Adventure of Death 223 

XVII The Mysteries of Life 227 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 



CHAPTER I 

THE UNIVERSALITY OF LIFE 

O raickle is the powerful grace that lies 
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities: 
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live, 
But to the earth some special good doth give. 

Shakespeare. Borneo and Juliet. 

Nothing walks with aimless feet; 

That not one life shall be destroyed 

Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete. 

Tennyson. In Mernorianu 

Life is the most wonderful thing in the world. We find 
it everywhere, abundant, prodigal, and luxuriant. 
Earth, sea, and sky teem with it. The grass in the 
fields, the flowers on the hillside, the trees in the forest, 
the birds in the air, the fish in the water, and all things 
that creep or walk are quick with life. We turn over 
a stone with our stick and sack a city, for under- 
neath it is a seething colony of ants, which scurry hither 
and thither in no purposeless panic, but intent on sav- 
ing themselves, their young, and their hoarded food from 
destruction by the invader. 

We look abroad and discover that wherever life could 
find a foothold it has established itself. There is living 
lichen on the rocks, and even on some bluff crag thrust 



2 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

up from the earth like the shoulder of a sleeping giant 
we find that life has seized on every little shelf and slope 
where a handful of earth has lodged. Not far from 
where I write there is a great range of limestone hills. 
Their summits are crowned by vegetation of many kinds, 
and pine-trees stand defiant in the blast ; but all along 
the precipitous sides, wherever niche or cranny has af- 
forded a lodgment, some tree has grown, and, hanging 
between the earth and the sky, where no cragsman would 
ever venture to tread, it proclaims the triumph of life 
over death, and the urgency of nature's demand for life, 
and yet more life. 

Life is such an urgent thing that it hastens to repair 
the devastation and havoc wrought by man. In the 
fields of Flanders and the fertile land of France the 
grass and the flowers are constantly seeking to hide the 
desolation which man has produced with his devilish 
engines of war. It is as though Nature shuddered at 
the defilement of Mother Earth and sought to cover her 
bruised body with pitying and flower-laden hands. 

Much of the beauty of the earth is due to the life 
upon it. Take away all the vegetation, roll up the 
green carpet of the grass, throw down the awe-inspiring 
aisles of forest trees, and earth would become a desolate 
and unlovely place. 

We live in a world of life. Much of it we can see 
with the unaided eye, but beyond the range of our 
natural vision there is a realm of nature in which life 
still fulfills itself. In a drop of river-water or a speck 
of road-dust the microscope reveals to us life in myriad 
forms, each distinct, but sharing in the one great prin- 
ciple which animates all living things. Every one of 
these infinitesimal creatures fills a niche of its own in 
the Universe. One may sit for hours at a time with an 
eye riveted to the tube of an ultramicroscope in a maze 






THE UNIVERSALITY OF LIFE 3 

of wonder, watching the dance of life performed by the 
teeming bacteria present in a minute drop of water from 
a stagnant pool. The field of vision is thronged by an 
innumerable multitude of actively moving, infinitely 
little living things. Some are engaged in a rhythmic 
dance, scarcely moving from their position. Others 
dart like some torpedo-craft across the field of vision, 
and pass out of sight. Others move with more leisurely 
progression like some sight-seer in an historic town; 
others again, with sinuous movement, ominous of evil 
purpose, bore their slow way across the visual field; 
and now and then, lit up by the reflected light, and all 
aglow like some barbaric princess loaded with precious 
stones, there swims into our ken a veritable queen of 
bacterial life. Royally she moves ; and, as one wonders, 
she is gone. 

All life is bound together in a community of mutual 
service. The master-chemist, the sun, at work in his 
laboratory in every blade of grass, is elaborating nour- 
ishment for all the cattle of the fields. The whole of 
the animal kingdom depends for its sustenance upon 
the green things of the earth. But the green things 
owe a debt to the animal kingdom in turn. The flower 
that pours its perfumed chalice into the ocean of the 
air depends upon the questing bee or other insect for 
that little speck of magic pollen-dust that will enable it 
to continue its life in another generation. The bird 
that tears a berry from a tree bears the seed off, and 
drops it perhaps many miles away, where haply it may 
find a resting-place and continue its kind. 

All life in Nature is directed to high service, and even 
death helps Nature to win fresh fields for life. Much 
of the surface of the earth, as we now know it, once 
lay at the bottom of the sea. Of itself sand offers but 
a poor and precarious sustenance for vegetable life; 



4 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 






but the first lowly plant that established itself upon the 
sand made the conquest of the desert an easier thing for 
the plants that followed it. It lived a difficult exist- 
ence, then it died, and its leaves and stem drooped and 
fell upon its inhospitable bed. But in making its sac- 
rifice it won an empire. It imparted to the sand all the 
riches it had won from its life in the atmosphere, and 
the sterile shore was gradually converted into hospit- 
able earth. The fertility of the earth is a perpetual 
witness to the rejuvenating power of death. Life feeds 
on death; and out of death new life forever rises. 
Nothing in Nature lives for its own ends alone ; nothing 
in Nature dies without bequeathing a heritage of some 
sort to other things that live. Even the bacillus, man's 
constant and deadly foe, when vanquished by him, 
renders up to him spoils of war that may help him 
to win in another fight. For every micro-organism that 
is destroyed by his mechanism of defense in the body 
of a human being, confers upon him some fresh power, 
some increase of immunity that will help to protect 
him against a similar attack. The man who walks 
scatheless through an epidemic of infectious disease 
does so, in some instances, because there has come to 
him by heredity a healthy constitution ; but part of his 
immunity is a legacy left to him by those germs of 
disease which, in the course of his life, have died 
within his body. Nothing that lives is valueless, and 
if only we could see the whole world of Nature spread 
before us like a picture and could understand all that 
there is to decipher, we should discover that it consti- 
tutes a great and beautiful whole in which, in spite 
of apparent universal struggle, there is a deep under- 
lying concord whose aim and purpose is life — life 
more adaptable and more capable of progress. 

All forms of life have the same physical basis, a 



THE UNIVERSALITY OF LIFE 5 

highly complex substance compounded from simple 
elements, known as protoplasm. This identity of the 
physical basis of life necessarily implies that life dif- 
fers more in degree than in kind. We and the higher 
animals have more activities, more potentialities than 
the lower forms of life, but, being built up from pro- 
toplasm, we are cousins-germane to every roadside 
weed, or every flower in the field. And for this, if for 
no other reason, we should walk humbly. 

In one of his essays Huxley pointed out a fact which 
must have struck any one who has ever sat on a hill- 
side and contemplated the life around him. All the 
essential processes of life are carried on in silence. 
The cataract of the sap rising in some giant tree sends 
no ripple of sound into the atmosphere to call our 
attention to it. The branches orientate themselves 
so that the leaves may catch the sunlight, and the 
leaves carry on their wonderful work of chemical dis- 
integration and chemical synthesis in absolute silence. 
The boom of the bursting bud is a poetic fancy, di- 
vorced from reality. The fruit ripens, and falls mel- 
low to the earth, but no murmur is wrung from the 
parent tree. The bleat of a straying sheep, the hum 
of a bee, the rasping crescendo of the grasshopper, 
the bark of a distant dog, all come to us vibrant and 
keen in the stillness of nature. But they are not es- 
sential processes of the life of the creatures that pro- 
duce them. They are the witnesses to the joy of life, 
or its perplexity. 

Our muscles contract noiselessly; in the river of 
our blood millions of little cargo-boats collide and move 
on again without a sound. Organs like the liver per- 
form marvelous functions of chemical conversion in 
absolute silence. A stethoscope applied to the chest 
enables us to hear the rhythmic thud of the closure 



6 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of the valves in the heart, and we may hear also the 
rustle of the air as it is sucked into the ramifying pas- 
sages through the lungs. But we can detect no sound 
from the processes of assimilation which are occurring 
so constantly in the heart muscle, to keep it in repair ; 
nor do we hear any noise and clamor that would tell us 
that the cells of the lungs are the busiest wharves in the 
world, where countless millions of cargo-boats are un- 
loading carbonic-acid gas, and taking in a freight of 
oxygen every moment of the day and night. 

Even thought, the highest function of which any liv- 
ing thing is capable, is a silent process. 

The question as to whether life exists on any other 
planet than our own is one of constant allurement, and 
as yet science has no definite and authoritative decla- 
ration to make. It has been pointed out that certain 
very special conditions are necessary for the main- 
tenance of life, such as an atmosphere of a certain 
density, containing at least oxygen and carbonic-acid 
gas, nitrogen and moisture; regularity, within certain 
limits, of temperature; an adequate amount of solar 
energy in the form of light and heat ; and an abundance 
of water. These things are necessary for life as we 
know it. But there may be other forms of life of 
which we have neither knowledge nor the power to con- 
ceive. To man, to all animals, and to all vegetable life 
oxygen is essential. But there is a class of micro-or- 
ganisms, of which the tetanus bacillus is one, to which 
oxygen is a deadly poison. They cannot live in its 
presence. They flourish in its absence. So it is ob- 
vious that the conditions which we know to be essential 
for the maintenance of human life upon the earth may 
not be necessary for other forms of life on other 
planets. It would indeed be strange if the infinite im- 
mensity of space, sprinkled over as it is by an incal- 



THE UNIVERSALITY OF LIFE 7 

culable number of worlds greater than our own, should 
offer no habitation to life but the surface of our minor 
planet, the earth. 

Flammarion, the distinguished French astronomer, 
was convinced that life exists on other planets than our 
own, and many think with him. But when we remem- 
ber the remarkable way in which life is affected by 
environment, we must be prepared to admit that any 
form of life met with among the stars, being subject to 
other influences, will probably differ in a marked degree 
from life as we know it. 

The simplest form of life is the unicellular organism 
— the protozoon. Man is built up from a multitude of 
such cells, many millions going to make up his body. 
But he does not consist of a coherent mass of protozoa 
welded together. His cells are specialized. Some 
are set aside in one organ to discharge certain func- 
tions ; others, in other organs, are devoted to still 
different ends. Complexity of organization has led to 
specialization of function, and the complex organism 
and the specialized function are integrated and con- 
trolled by the marvelously developed nervous system 
of which he is possessed. He is no mere collection of 
cells. He is a self-determined individual, sharing in 
common with the lowlier forms of life the power of 
growth, the functions of assimilation and nutrition, the 
power of reproduction, and participating with them in 
the inevitable experience of death. But he has an ex- 
perience which is his and his alone. Endowed with the 
golden gift of reason, he is, to some extent, the master 
of his own destiny. For him life need not be a mean- 
ingless repetition of elementary and almost automatic 
functions. He may scale the dizzy heights of joy, or 
plumb the depths of sorrow. Made for action, eager 
for life, capable of self-sacrifice and of worship, ever 



8 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

hungering insatiably for new knowledge, man may make 
of life no meaningless adventure, but a glorious oppor- 
tunity. 

Though a great chasm divides the inanimate things 
in Nature from the things that have life, Life is per- 
petually making use of the inanimate, quickening it to 
new activities. The iron of the earth, and the limestone 
rock broken up by atmospheric influences, are absorbed 
and modified by the plant life of the fields, and become 
incorporate in the bodies of animals, and may ascend 
through bird or sheep or oxen to a place in the body of 
man. Life spins fresh matter into her ever-growing 
web, and when the web crumbles into dust, Life picks 
up the separated atoms once again and weaves other 
and possibly still more beautiful webs. Matter, which 
some hold to be the only reality, is little more than a 
delusion : it becomes real only when it subserves the pur- 
poses of life. 

All the forces of Nature are leagued in a great con- 
spiracy. The sunbeam which trips daintily over a field 
of ripening corn, sprinkling the last flecks of gold on 
the tumid ears, is completing with its living touch the 
work made possible by myriads of dead and lowly 
things. Many generations of plant life perished to pre- 
pare the soil ; worms and insects and bacteria have la- 
bored and died to enrich it. Winter has crumbled it 
in her ice-cold fingers ; Spring has warmed it with her 
breath; Summer has sounded her reveille and mar- 
shalled the serried ranks of standing corn, teaching 
them to forage in the limitless acres of the atmosphere ; 
the rain has poured out its libation, and the wind is 
come with a promise that the time of harvest shall not 
fail, and that there will be food for man and beast. 
For the whole Universe works together in the service 
of life, which is the goal of Nature and her crown. 



CHAPTER II 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



" I call the effects of Nature the works of God, whose hand and 
instrument she only is; and therefore to ascribe His actions unto 
her is to devolve the honor of the principal agent upon the in- 
strument, which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers 
rise up and boast that they have built our houses, and our pen 
receive the honor of our writings." 

Sir Thomas Browxe. Religio Medici. 

In all ages the question of the origin of life has allured 
and perplexed the thinking man. Unable to fathom 
the mystery, he has either folded his hands and aban- 
doned his search for a solution, or he has fallen back 
upon his imagination, and some of the most beautiful 
legends of mythology were the offerings made by fancy 
to the clamant appeal of the hungering mind for a 
knowledge of the truth. 

From the days of Aristotle down to our own time the 
idea of the possibility of spontaneous generation has 
had its supporters. They hold that the line between 
the non-living and the living, which is passed in the 
reverse direction by everything that breathes at death, 
is largely an artificial barrier, and they believe that 
animate things may rise spontaneously from the inani- 
mate. The careful experiments of Pasteur did much 
to disprove the doctrine, but of recent years it has re- 
ceived a fresh impetus from the researches of Leduc, and 
from the observation of Burke of Cambridge, who 
studied the effects produced by radium emanations upon 
solutions of gelatine. A great body of scientific opin- 






10 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ion is, however, opposed to the possibility of spontan- 
eous generation occurring. It is worthy of note that 
whenever living things are said to have appeared spon- 
taneously they have been found to belong to animal or 
vegetable species which are already known. This is in 
itself a powerful argument against their authenticity. 
If spontaneous generation ever occurs, either in nature 
or under laboratory conditions, it would probably pre- 
sent us with entirely new forms of life. This would 
mean the constant appearance of new species, and we 
know that the number of species increases only by age- 
long variations. 

Aristotle, no mean scientific observer, who studied the 
manifestations of life carefully and recognized the un- 
broken chain which links the lowest plant with the 
higher animals, believed that certain fishes were pro- 
duced spontaneously, and Virgil, naturalist and poet, 
tells in his Georgics how a goddess taught the shepherd 
to cause living bees to rise from the flanks of a dead 
bullock. In the De rerum Natura Lucretius expressed 
the opinion that animals might develop from the action 
of the sun upon the vapors and moisture of the earth. 

At a much later date Van Helmont, who lived in the 
sixteenth century, stated that living mice and scorpions 
could be produced at will, like the live rabbit from the 
conjuror's hat, by mixing together certain ingredients. 
His recipe for the spontaneous generation of mice con- 
sisted of a mixture of dirty linen with wheat, or a piece 
of cheese, while scorpions could be produced by ex- 
posing sweet basil to the heat of the sun in the hollow 
of a scooped-out brick. These interesting conclusions 
were the outcome either of inaccurate observation, or 
of faulty method which left a loop-hole for error to 
creep in — in one case a vagrant mother-mouse, in the 
other a scorpion. Holinshed, in whose historical works 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 11 

Shakespeare dug deep for the ground-work of some of 
his plays, said in his Description of England, " A horse- 
hair laid in a pailfull of turbid water will in a short time 
stir and become a living creature." This erroneous 
idea still persists in some country districts. 

In approaching the study of the origin of life we must 
not forget that the earth existed as a glowing ball of 
fire for many aeons before it cooled down sufficiently to 
give to life a fit nidus in which to develop. Though 
some forms of life are marvelously tolerant of extremes 
either of heat or cold, life as a rule requires for its 
maintenance and propagation certain somewhat special- 
ized conditions, and until such conditions were attain- 
able upon our globe there was no life upon it. The 
late Lord Kelvin calculated that some time between 
twenty and forty million years ago the conditions upon 
the earth began to be compatible with the development 
of life. The margin of twenty million years between 
the two dates seems a generous and ample concession, 
though it is only a moment relatively to the immense 
and incalculable period since the gaseous particles or 
atoms of meteoric dust that were the prototype of our 
planet rushed to each other in the cosmic dance, and, 
blazing through space, Earth started on her pilgrimage 
along the unbeaten track of her orbit. 

Before we proceed to consider how life may have 
come to earth we must recognize two facts. First, that 
life on this planet probably began in the sea, and, sec- 
ond, that vegetable life was, almost certainly, the pre- 
cursor of animal life. The former of these postulates 
is founded on the knowledge that moisture is necessary 
for the continuance of life in its full activity, and 
that the sea would offer a medium whose temperature 
was less variable than that of the adjacent land. 
Further, it should not be forgotten that in the water 



12 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of the sea are found dissolved most of those inorganic 
or mineral substances that are requisite for the support 
of plant life, and the constant motion of the sea would 
bring the necessary pabulum to the growing plant. 
Vegetable life must have preceded animal life, for not 
even yet, after these millions of years during which it 
has succeeded in accommodating itself to many changes 
of environment, has the animal economy found a way 
of supporting itself directly from inorganic materials. 
Plant life is the j ackal, it is the lion's provider : it caters 
for animal life, and without vegetable life, unless it 
suddenly acquired new powers, animal life would speedily 
and inevitably die out. 

Probably life appeared in the sea in a form even 
more elementary than those simple unicellular forma- 
tions such as the protozoa and the various forms of 
bacterial life which we know to-day. Some biologists 
believe that by the time the protozoon was reached, evo- 
lution had already many years behind it. 

There are several theories as to the origin of life, 
each of which has its advocates. There is the theory 
that life is the result of a definite creative act of the 
great First Cause that lies behind the Universe. An- 
other opinion is that life did not originate on our planet, 
but came to it as a rich bequest from some other world 
that perished years ago. In the collision or cataclysm 
which shattered that planet some particle of living mat- 
ter, it is suggested, found refuge in a cleft in a piece of 
rock, and the fragment of rock, rushing through space 
as a meteorite, fell upon the earth and surrendered its 
precious burden to the waves of the sea. Both Lord 
Kelvin and von Helmholtz accepted this hypothesis as a 
feasible explanation of the manner in which life may have 
come to earth ; but it has been opposed by other authori- 
ties on the ground that in its passage through our at- 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 13 

mosphere a meteorite glows with intense heat, and con- 
sequently its temperature is raised to a degree that is 
incompatible with life. On the other hand it has been 
urged that, if the cleft in the meteorite were sufficiently 
deep, its little germinal burden might find adequate pro- 
tection even though the surface of the meteorite were 
hotter than Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. It has also 
been suggested that life may have come to earth from 
some other planet without the intervention of a meteor-* 
ite to carry it. Cohn put forward the suggestion that, 
in the cosmic dust which floats through space and falls 
gently as the dew upon the expectant bosom of the 
earth, there might be mingled living cells that had wan- 
dered or been hurled into space from some other planet. 
Falling gradually through our atmosphere, these living 
cells would not attain such a velocity that their tem- 
perature would be raised to a degree incompatible with 
their continued vitality. Svante Arrhenius has sug- 
gested that living matter may travel from star to star, 
impelled by the pressure of the waves of light. But 
both theories have had their opponents, who believe that 
the actinic rays of the sun would destroy these elemen- 
tary living cells in their long passage through the vast- 
nesses of interplanetary space. 

In 1872 W. Preyer made a novel suggestion con- 
cerning the origin of life upon the earth. He was of 
opinion that life was present in the midst of the glowing 
mass of incandescent matter of which the earth con- 
sisted before it began to cool. According to his view 
the molten ball teemed with low forms of life which he 
called pyrozoa. These life-forms differed radically 
from any type of living thing that we know to-day in 
their extraordinary capacity for resisting heat. As the 
earth cooled the pyrozoa adapted themselves to the new 
conditions, and became the remote predecessors of those 



14 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

forms of life with which we are acquainted. Preyer's 
theory did not receive much support, and to-day it is 
almost forgotten. 

Of recent years an attempt has been made to prove 
that life arose spontaneously when the surface of the 
cooling earth was covered by chemical substances in a 
condition of nascent activity. According to this 
theory creation has not yet ceased. It is still in op- 
eration, and life continues to be engendered afresh from 
non-living materials. 

The chemist has divided matter into two great classes 
— organic substances and inorganic substances. An 
organic substance is one which contains carbon, while 
an inorganic substance, such for example as sulphate 
of iron, oxide of lead, or bichloride of mercury, is car- 
bon-free. For a long period it was believed that the 
line separating the organic from the inorganic was 
sharp and well-defined, and that at no point did the sub- 
stances in the two classes approximate to each other 
in composition or character. But about the middle of 
the last century Thomas Graham began to investigate 
the properties of a series of bodies which he called 
colloids (from colla — glue) an example of which is 
gelatine, and he enunciated the opinion that in the col- 
loids we have a large group of substances that come 
near to bridging the chasm between the organic and 
the inorganic. As sometimes happens with an epoch- 
making discovery, his work was neglected and almost 
forgotten, until about the beginning of the present cen- 
tury, when its importance dawned upon the chemist and 
physiologist, and the chemistry of the colloids has be- 
come one of the most fertile territories for research that 
the scientific mind has yet discovered. With singular 
clarity of vision Graham recognized the close rela- 
tionship subsisting between the character of the col- 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 15 

loids and the phenomena of life, and later observers 
have not hesitated to suggest that through the colloids 
one may pick one's way from the inorganic to the or- 
ganic, and from the inanimate to the living. 

If, in imagination, equipped with all the resources 
of modern chemical knowledge, we could throw ourselves 
back through the ages to that primeval time when the 
earth had cooled just to that degree of temperature 
compatible with life, we should find ourselves contem- 
plating a sphere bubbling with energy and instinct with 
chemical change. Earth would still be warm to the 
touch. It would be enveloped in a thick cloud of 
vapor, an atmosphere saturated with moisture. As the 
land cooled the saturated atmosphere above it would 
give up some of its vapor, in huge quantities of dew or 
rain, as though some giant hand were squeezing the 
moisture from a colossal sponge. The falling water 
would plow channels for itself over the surface of the 
cooling globe, and, flowing down to the valleys, would 
make the lakes and the oceans, dividing peak from peak, 
island from island, and continent from continent. Be- 
sides carrying an excess of moisture, the atmosphere 
would almost certainly contain a higher percentage of 
carbonic acid gas than it does to-day, and be more 
highly charged with electrical energy. Huge volcanoes 
would be in active eruption, filling the atmosphere with 
fine dust brought from the bowels of the earth — dust 
charged with strange radio-active properties. The 
surface of the globe would be a vast chemical labor- 
atory, where atoms were groping after atoms, finding 
each day new affinities stable or unstable, breaking 
away from old combinations at the lure of new and 
more efficient ones ; where every gas and every element 
was in a nascent state, that condition in which its energy 
is most potent. It wa$ an hour pregnant with tremen- 



16 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

dous possibilities. We have called it an hour; it may 
have been an aeon, for we have no means of measuring 
the duration of the epoch during which earth was ap- 
proaching that degree of temperature compatible with 
the reception or development of the first living cell. 

Protoplasm, the physical basis of all life, whether 
vegetable or animal, consists of carbon, oxygen, hy- 
drogen, nitrogen, with traces of phosphorus and pos- 
sibly sulphur. Science knows no living thing which does 
not consist of protoplasm. 

It has been suggested that life originated on the earth 
in the following manner. In the primeval dawn when, 
as we have seen, earth was a great chemical laboratory, 
certain molecules of those elements we have stated to be 
the constituents of protoplasm united in the waters of 
some quiet lagoon or peaceful bay of the sea. The 
union would be more or less stable, and the protoplasmic 
jelly would tend to increase in size. Occasionally frag- 
ments of the jelly would be broken off by mechanical 
means, and they in turn would continue to combine with 
other elements and increase in size by accretion. As 
molecule united with molecule, it has been suggested that 
various unstable compounds uniting with this primitive 
but still lifeless protoplasm would supply it with stores 
of energy, the liberation of which would produce auto- 
matic movement and possibly bring about the subdivision 
of the formless mass. That this is no fantastic dream 
has been demonstrated by the fascinating experiments 
of Professor Stephane Leduc, who, under suitable con- 
ditions, has succeeded in producing in solutions of in- 
organic salts figures of growth which closely resem- 
ble plant life, and processes of cellular division that 
reproduce exactly the nuclear and cellular division of 
a living cell with all the complicated figures of mitosis. 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 17 

But Leduc's beautiful figments are* after all, only 
phantasms of life ; they are not living entities. 

Similarly the carbon-containing protoplasmic jelly 
which we have imagined growing in some silent mist- 
shadowed lagoon was not a living thing. It lacked 
the subtle touch of the vitalizing wand of life. 
Whence could that come? To this the science of 
chemistry makes a ready answer. There are sub- 
stances known as catalysers, which have the power of 
producing chemical changes and chemical combinations 
between other substances ,*while they themselves re- 
main unaffected. The class-room experiment with 
spongy platinum is well known. If hydrogen and 
oxygen are mixed in the proper proportion in a closed 
vessel they may be kept indefinitely at ordinary tem- 
peratures without any combination taking place be- 
tween them. But if a fragment of spongy platinum 
be dropped into the mixture the two gases combine in- 
stantaneously with a loud explosion, and water is pro- 
duced. The spongy platinum remains unaltered, and 
may be used over and over again for a similar ex- 
periment. It has acted simply as a catalyser. It has 
been the finger that has pulled the trigger of the gun. 

Chemists have discovered several catalysing agents, 
and it is possible that when the world was young many 
substances existed with this property. So it has been 
suggested that one of these agents came into contact 
with a mass of lifeless protoplasmic jelly, containing 
the elements we have mentioned, and caused them to 
combine, linking up the molecules in such a way that 
they became possessed of that new, extraordinary, and 
unfathomable property that we know as life. 

To explain the continuance of life upon the earth 
and its further development from the primordial mass 



18 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of vitalized protoplasm we must postulate that it did 
not appear till the nidus or nest was ready for it. 
If this first union of the elements into living proto- 
plasm had occurred, as it might have done, at a time 
when the surrounding conditions were incompatible 
with its continuance and development the living mass 
would have relapsed again into an inert and lifeless 
condition. The fact that a specific point in time and 
a special concatenation of antecedent conditions was 
a necessary precursor of the appearance of life upon 
the earth should be emphasized. Its importance will 
become apparent later. 

We have seen that the origin of life upon the earth 
has been explained in four ways : 

1. As the result of a definite creative act. 

2. By the transference of living cells from some 
other planet. 

3. By the existence of life in a low and peculiar 
form (pyrozoa) in the substance of the earth 
while it was still a blazing cloud of gas. 

4. By the union of certain elements, under suitable 
conditions, by natural processes, without the in- 
tervention of any outside intelligent guidance. 

The first theory is the only one which insists upon 
the necessity of a causative and intelligent agent 
operating from without. It is the theory held by the 
Christian Church, and it has withstood a multitude of 
attacks from many quarters. The second theory does 
no more than push the difficulty a little further back. 
It does not pretend to explain the origin of life, but 
simply suggests a means whereby life came to the planet. 
It is not, therefore, an adequate solution of the prob- 
lem with which we are confronted. If life, as we know 
it, came to earth from some other planet, we have a nat- 
ural desire to know how it originated there. What 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 19 

causes operated to bring it into being? Was it created, 
or did it arise spontaneously there? We find ourselves 
in the orbit of a vicious circle, and we have not suc- 
ceeded in doing more than transferring our difficulty to 
another sphere, where its solution is beyond our reach. 

All that need be said of the third theory is that if 
the pyrozoa, as Preyer suggested, were coeval with the 
matter out of which the earth is formed, whence did 
they come, and why were they endowed with life? 
Were they simply fragments of matter raised to the 
7i th degree? 

The last theory really amounts to the statement 
that, given the conditions presupposed, life had inev- 
itably to follow. It is, in some sort, a modern elabo- 
ration of a conception already formulated by Lucre- 
tius : 

" Multaque nunc etiam exsistunt animalia terris, 
Imbribus et calido solis concreta vapore." i 

It has received a great impetus from the discoveries 
relating to radio-active substances, and is now held 
in some form or other by many scientists as offering 
a feasible explanation of the origin of life. But 
when we come to examine it critically we find that it 
does not carry us far enough. It deals only with 
secondary causes. It explains a possible method. 
It takes no cognizance of what lies behind the method. 
To reach a satisfactory conclusion we must come to 
closer grips with the problem. We must look deeper. 

The ancient conception of matter was that it con- 
sisted of an aggregation of atoms, an atom being a 
particle so small that it could not be divided or cut. 
Two atoms unite to form a molecule; molecules unite 

1 " And now there arise from the earth many living creatures 
produced by the rain and the warm vapor of the sun." 



20 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

and form an appreciable mass. For many long years 
this theory of the atom held the field. It fitted the 
known facts regarding matter. It " worked," and was 
therefore regarded as valid. But science is never con- 
tent with her conquests, and however severely she may 
have handled the speculations of the philosophers or 
the conceptions of the theologians, she never hes- 
itated to scrutinize with equal impartiality the the- 
ories which have been stepping-stones in her own 
progress. So she has cast the theory of the atom 
into her crucibles and remolded it anew. Led by 
Svante Arrhenius, a distinguished chemist and 
physicist, she has begun to wonder if matter is 
really the " solid " thing she imagined it to be, and is 
not, rather, simply a condition of motion. Bishop 
Berkeley long ago suggested that, apart from the per- 
cipient mind, matter had no existence. Modern sci- 
ence stretches out a hand to him across the centuries 
and agrees that matter may be nothing more than a 
condition of motion affecting our senses. Arrhenius' 
conception of the atom is that, tiny and invisible 
though it be, it is really akin to a planetary system. 
In the center is a positively charged electron; round 
it spin an innumerable multitude of negatively charged 
electrons, and the relative distance between the cen- 
trally placed electron and its negatively charged sat- 
ellites and their relative distance from each other, 
is as great as the gulf that separates the sun from 
the planets and the planets from one another. It is a 
bold conception, with a tinge of poetic inspiration, 
and it has served to explain certain physical phenom- 
ena that were difficult to understand on the older 
theory, such as radio-activity and the emission of the 
cathode rays from an X-ray tube. Whether or not 
it will stand the acid test of time, or the scrutinizing 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 21 

eye which science has already turned upon it, is as yet 
impossible to say. But some, who are willing to take 
the theory as it stands and apply it fully, have not 
hesitated to suggest that the whole mystery of the 
existence of the Universe, and the coming of life itself, 
may be explained by the application of this concep- 
tion. 

They imagine that, in the beginning, infinite space 
was filled by the infinite ether, still, silent, immovable. 
A little stress or strain appeared in the ether; it 
was thrown into motion ; the first " atom " was formed ; 
it became as " the little leaven which leaveneth the 
whole lump." And from this atomic dance in the 
ether " matter " as we know it was formed, and the sun, 
the moon, the myriad stars, and our own earth, which 
is, after all, only a third-rate orb in the Milky Way, 
came progressively into being. 

The conception is a bold one, bold to the verge of 
unreason, but it does not explain all. It is an axiom 
accepted alike by the scientist and the philosopher 
that every change in anything previously existing 
must have had an adequate and preexisting cause. 
Or, to express it baldly, cause must precede effect. If 
we are honest with ourselves we are brought face to 
face with the question — What started this stress in 
the ether? and we stand mute and perplexed till we are 
thrown back upon a First Cause. Both science and 
philosophy have an evil and inveterate tendency to 
rest content, when driven to the extremes of thought, 
with attaching a label to a difficulty and imagining 
that such a ritual explains it. To attribute the stress 
to a First Cause is to fall short of satisfying the human 
heart that hungers after knowledge. What is this 
First Cause? Is it a blind force; or some cold, 
aloof, impersonal abstraction like the Absolute of 



%% THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the Philosopher: or a living, vivid, omniscient in- 
telligence — eternal, omnipotent God? Blind forces, 
acting at hazard, do not usually produce results which 
are orderly and well-regulated, and which can be ex- 
pressed in mathematical formulae. The Universe is a 
highly complex fabric, but that part of it which comes 
within our ken is controlled by the operation of certain 
laws, some of which Kepler and Newton have discovered 
for us. And when our knowledge is sufficiently ad- 
vanced we shall probably find that other phenomena 
besides those of the inter-attraction of bodies in space, 
and the procession of the planets, are subject to law. 
The Universe presents a daily and nightly demonstra- 
tion of beauty, of harmony and of law, and to imagine 
a blind force to be capable of acting as a cause and 
producing such effects is to tax the credulity of the 
most ignorant. No blind force agitating in a tray 
the fragments of a jig-saw puzzle will ever succeed 
in putting it together. No little child, given a box 
of colors and the necessary brushes, could blindly 
splash them on canvas till a Corot stood revealed; no 
cascade of water, drawn by the " natural force " of 
gravity over a precipice, and falling through ages 
on a block of marble would wear it down till out of its 
stony hardness " The Winged Victory of Samothrace " 
or two tender palpitating figures, aglow with love, 
like Sinding's " Two Human Beings " burst on the rav- 
ished eye. We do not expect such things to happen. 
From experience we know that they are unattainable 
by such means. But still, in the face of all reason, there 
are some who cannot find a more satisfactory explana- 
tion for the wonders revealed to us in the Universe, and 
the culminating wonder of human life than the opera- 
tion of a blind force. 

There are many who are prepared to go so far as 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 23 

to admit that, to use a figure of speech, God started 
the machine, but they are unwilling to accept the idea 
that He is immanent in the Universe, and still guides 
and controls its every operation. According to their 
oelief the original stress in the ether was produced 
by God; the after consequences came as an unavoid- 
able sequence. Speaking anthropomorphically, the 
finger of God disturbed the ether: the rest followed 
without any further guidance or control. To sug- 
gest this is to reduce the Creator to the level of a med^ 
dlesome boy who relaxes the brake on a chain of rail- 
way wagons at the top of a colliery bank, and, startled, 
sees them race down the incline, beyond control, with 
consequences that he can neither foresee nor direct. 

If we are prepared to admit the idea of an intelli- 
gent Creator we ought to be prepared to go further, 
and allow that He foreknew all that would follow His 
first energizing touch. He saw the end from the be- 
ginning: He planned it should be so. 

All this is, apparently, an unwarrantable digression 
from the matter in question — viz., the origin of life. 
But the practical application of the digression will 
emerge shortly. There are some who are willing to 
accept the idea of God as a Creator of the material 
non-living Universe, but who hesitate to attribute to 
Him, except very indirectly, the origin of life. They 
hold that life would come as a consequence of the inter- 
actions of matter. 

A distinguished scientific investigator of reverent 
mind and profound knowledge — Professor Benjamin 
Moore — has said : " Given the presence of matter and 
energy forms under the proper conditions, life must 
come, inevitably ; " and he is of opinion that " If all in- 
telligent creatures were by some holocaust destroyed, 
up out of the depths in process of millions of years 



24 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

intelligent beings would once more emerge." He 
bases his conclusions on his vast knowledge of chem- 
istry and the properties of matter. But we must not 
forget that the Creative Mind which constructed the 
Universe endowed the atoms with whatever qualities 
they possess ; gave to the light of the sun those mar- 
velous powers upon which all living things depend; 
ruled that atom should combine with atom in certain 
ways ; and that, if certain conditions were fulfilled, 
certain results would follow. If we look at things 
in this way — and it seems rational to do so — we are 
forced to the conclusion that wherever or in whatever 
fashion life originated, it did so with the foreknowl- 
edge, and at the behest of the Mind that molded the 
firmament, and at the point in time when the sur- 
rounding conditions were compatible with its con- 
tinuance. If we accept this we are admitting that the 
origin of life was a definite creative act. 

Philosophy and science may spin their webs of 
theory — 

" Fine as ice-ferns on January panes 
Made by a breath," 

but the theories may serve only to obscure the truth 
they seek to make plain. Even knowledge may 
darken counsel with words ; but when all the mighty 
tomes which men have written to explain the mystery 
of the Universe and the fact of human life have crum- 
bled into dust there will still remain, embroidered on 
the garment of Nature and picked out in starry points 
across the vastness of the sky, the message which all 
may read whose vision is unclouded : " In the be- 
ginning, God." 



CHAPTER III 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN 



" A fire-mist and a planet, 
A crystal and a cell, 
A jellyfish and a saurian, 
And caves where the cavemen dwell; 
Then a sense of law and beauty, 
And a face turned from the clod — 
Some call it Evolution, 
And others call it God." 

Carruth. 

We have already pointed out that a characteristic of 
life is its urgency, its tendency to increase, and once 
it appeared on earth, or rather in the water of the 
earth, and found the conditions there favorable for 
its continuance, it began to expand. In all likelihood 
the first cell that vibrated with being was a lowlier 
form than any we know to-day, but it must have had 
some, if not all, of the properties which we find in the 
modern unicellular organisms. For instance, it must 
have had the power of growth. Now growth, if we 
distinguish it from simple accretion, necessarily pre- 
supposes the power of assimilation, which is the prop- 
erty possessed by a living cell of taking into its in- 
terior substances that differ from it in chemical com- 
position, and, after modifying them, incorporating them 
in its structure. It must also have had a capacity 
for renewing itself and repairing any damage which 
it might sustain, and, from ;what we [know of the 
progress of life, we may conclude that it had the power 
of responding in some measure to changes in its en- 

25 



26 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

vironment. Early in the life of the cell it must have 
acquired the power of multiplication, probably by 
simple division. The reason is fairly clear. A small 
cell absorbs nutriment from without. Unless the 
amount of material excreted is in equilibrium with and 
exactly balances the amount taken in, the original cell 
must increase in size. The larger the cell the more 
nutriment will be required for its support. It ab- 
sorbs through its surface. A point is at last reached 
when the single surface of the cell begins to be in- 
sufficient to absorb enough nourishment to support 
the organism. Either of two things may then hap- 
pen: the cell may die, or it may divide into two. If 
the first living cell on earth had died instead of di- 
viding, earth would, once again, have been unten- 
anted. But we believe — and here we are not spec- 
ulating, since such division has been observed over and 
over again — that the primordial cell divided. In this 
way the size of the individual was lessened, since what 
was one became two. When we divide an apple with a 
knife we increase its superficies by adding to it twice 
the total area of the cut surface. The result of the 
division of an unicellular protozoon does not give so 
large an increase in superficial area, but it does add 
considerably to the extent of the surface through 
which nourishment can be obtained. Life therefore 
becomes a simpler problem in economics for the 
two daughter cells than it had been for the single 
mother-cell. Division was to the advantage of the 
economy, so multiplication by simple fission became 
the rule for all simple forms of cell-life. In this way 
life increased. 

The first living cell was a vegetable or plant cell, 
and probably it appeared in the sea. Plant life can 
support itself on almost any form of nourishment. 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN &7 

Animal life is more specialized; it requires the inter- 
vention of plant life to make much of the material 
upon which it feeds assimilable. Plant life performs 
this function for animal life because it is a great chem- 
ist, or rather, it is a great chemical laboratory in 
which the presiding chemist is the sun. It cannot be 
sufficiently emphasized that life as we know it is de- 
pendent upon the sun. The hand that with a stroke 
could blot out the sun, would with the same stroke 
extinguish all life on the earth. How much life may 
owe to the other planets we cannot as yet tell; but 
we are aware that it owes not a little to the moon, for 
it was that beacon which lured life out of the sea. 
Some moon-drawn wave, straying high upon the beach, 
left behind it upon the tawny sand a nucleus of plant 
life, and the miracle spread from the waters to the dry 
land. Ancient mythology tells us that Venus in all 
her beauty rose from the sea-foam. But the whole 
pageant of nature, constantly changing and constantly 
renewed in fresh loveliness, was also a gift from the 
ocean to the earth. If life had remained always and 
solely in the sea it would not have made the progress of 
which we are at once the goal and the witnesses. The 
simpler forms of life have remained in the sea, and most 
of the cold-blooded animals are found there to-day. 
But on the land, after the first struggle for adaptation, 
new conditions and new stimulants of growth were acces- 
sible in ample measure. Oxygen was procurable in suffi- 
cient quantity, and it was more easily obtainable than 
in the water. But life has never forgotten that the 
sea was its first habitat, for it cannot continue to 
exist without water, and all mankind, as well as all 
plants and animals, are still living in an ocean — the 
saline fluid which permeates all our tissues, and with- 
out which we should all die. 



28 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Out of the protoplasm contained in the first living 
cell that was stranded on the shore the sun elaborated 
a remarkable chemical compound known as chloro- 
phyll. A plant grown in the dark is pale, anaemic- 
looking, and delicate. Its leaves are white. But if 
such a plant be brought from its unwholesome sur- 
roundings into the gracious presence of diffused sun- 
light, in a few days a remarkable change will take 
place. Gradually the leaves become green, and the 
plant loses its wilted appearance. The green color- 
ing matter is chlorophyll. It is the handmaiden of 
the sun, and it is able, under the influence of sunlight, 
to break up the carbonic acid of the atmosphere into 
its constituents of carbon and oxygen, rendering the 
carbon easily assimilable by the plant. It is upon the 
carbon thus absorbed that plant life largely depends 
for its sustenance. It derives moisture and certain 
salts from the earth in which it is rooted, but the 
chief source of its food is the carbon of the air, 

The first form of plant life that appeared on the 
land was probably one of the mushroom-like fungi. We 
speak of a " mushroom family " when we desire to indi- 
cate that the family is of recent origin and rapid 
social advancement. But we should not forget that 
the mushroom is of very ancient and honorable line- 
age as one of its congeners is the oldest stock on the 
earth. 

Long after the fungi appeared upon land there came 
the flowering plants. They represent a step much 
higher up the evolutionary ladder. They are vegeta- 
ble life specialized for reproduction. They are more 
adaptable to various environments, and are endowed 
with properties which permit of their spreading every- 
where. 

But before the flowering plants came it is probable 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN 29 

that animal life had begun to appear. The ubiqui- 
tous microbe represents a stage somewhere between 
vegetable and animal life. It has not jet been de- 
cided whether microbes should be regarded as belong- 
ing to the animal or vegetable kingdom, though the 
weight of opinion tends to consign them to the latter. 
They contain no chlorophyll, and therefore are unable 
to derive the nourishment they require from the air. 
If the conditions under which they are placed are sat- 
isfactory they have a capacity for extremely rapid 
multiplication. It has been calculated that if a chol- 
era bacillus is supplied with a suitable pabulum and 
kept at a suitable temperature it will, in the course 
of twenty-four hours, have over fifteen hundred tril- 
lion descendants. The figure is a staggering one, and 
helps to show that, if man had not the means of de- 
stroying such a menace, the micro-organism, and not 
the human being, would be master in the world. 

Long after the earliest forms of bacterial life ap- 
peared the first protozoon came into being. It was 
a gelatinous mass of protoplasm, probably without 
any enveloping membrane. It was something more 
than a plant: it was something less than an animal. 
Slowly, by gradual changes, the line of demarcation 
between plant and animal forms was determined, and 
the sea began to have two varieties of inhabitants re- 
sembling each other, but far from identical. As the 
years rolled on there appeared creatures of the jelly- 
fish type, sponges, sea-anemones, sea-bears, star-fish, 
Nature early showing her love for opulent and pro- 
gressive variety. Later still came the molluscs, crea- 
tures that could accommodate themselves to conditions 
either within the water, their natural habitat, or upon 
the gray and gnarled surface of the rocks when the 
waves temporarily receded. Then came the sea-crea- 



30 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

tures with jointed limbs, the crabs, the lobsters, and 
the sea-insects. It has been calculated that, about the 
time when the marine animals had reached this stage, 
vegetable life had established its first footing upon the 
land. After the lobster class came the fishes, at first 
with incomplete skeletons, and later, after the lapse of 
many centuries, more perfect fishes with a complete os- 
seous framework. Then came the amphibians, crea- 
tures at home alike in the water and out of it, and ani- 
mal life stepped ashore. About this time, it is esti- 
mated, the flowering plants had been differentiated — 
a graceful coincidence which enabled Nature to deck 
herself with flowers to welcome the new-coming guest. 
These primitive amphibians were the advance-guard of 
animal life upon the earth. Ungainly creatures with 
four limbs adapted either for swimming or for walking, 
they spent their early life in the water breathing 
through their gills, and lived in their adult stage upon 
the land, making use of specially developed lungs for 
the purposes of respiration. Once established upon 
the earth, the amphibia rapidly increased in variety, 
diverging in various directions. At one time they 
constituted a very large class : now, their position in 
the animal kingdom is a subordinate one. One may 
well imagine that the raucous clamor of frogs in the 
night is their age-long protest against the forgetful- 
ness of man, who rarely remembers that it was one of 
their ancestors who boldly set his life upon a hazard 
and ventured to come ashore. 

After the amphibians came the reptiles, and it is 
singular that the birds, which every one loves, are de- 
scended from the reptiles towards which every 
one feels a constitutional repulsion. The mam- 
malia, the great class to which all human beings be- 
long, probably appeared about the same time as the 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN 31 

birds from some reptilian stem. The mammals mul- 
tiplied rapidly, became differentiated into many 
groups, and at last the summit of the long ascent was 
reached in the development of man. 

Such is, in brief, a cursory account of the genesis 
of man according to the evolutionary doctrine. Long 
ago Aristotle pointed out how very closely all forms 
of plant and animal life were related to each other. In 
the eighteenth century Bonnet added to our knowl- 
edge of the relationship of animals one to another and 
tried to trace an unbroken sequence of development 
from the lower animals to man. Lamarck, perplexed 
by the difficulty in differentiating species, called atten- 
tion to the possibility of variation impressed upon the 
individual being the determining factor in producing 
new species from a common stem; but it was left to 
the genius of Charles Darwin to point out that in nat- 
ural selection lay the key to variation, and the solu- 
tion of the problem of the origin of species. With 
infinite patience, touched with the spirit of genius, and 
with that reverence which is almost invariably a char- 
acteristic of the truly great mind, Darwin worked 
out his theory carefully, showing that behind the prin- 
ciple of selection lay another principle, the survival 
of the fittest. Capacity for adaptation to the re- 
quirements of new environment, and the relentless ex- 
termination of individuals and species that lacked this 
faculty, had led to the continued existence of certain 
varieties of animal and plant life, and the extinction 
of others. If Darwin had been left to champion his 
theory alone it is unlikely that it would have pro- 
voked as much hostility as it did; but he was badly 
served by some of those who seized upon his hypoth- 
esis and flung it rudely in the teeth of many a fondly 
cherished belief. 



32 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Haeckel, with prodigious energy and Teutonic thor- 
oughness, has traced with care all the evolutionary 
steps from the lowest form of life up to man, illus- 
trating his narrative by constant reference to mem- 
bers of the various groups that still survive as in- 
habitants of the earth, the air, and the sea. He has 
laid special emphasis upon the fact that ontogeny, 
which is the science of the development of the indi- 
vidual, is a condensed epitome of phylogeny, or the his- 
tory of the development of the species, and he has ap- 
plied this doctrine to the life-history of man. It can- 
not be denied that much evidence may be adduced in 
support of this opinion. Starting from the embryonic 
primordial cell, which resembles a protozoon, the hu- 
man off-spring, in the course of its antenatal growth, 
passes through many stages which closely approxi- 
mate to various lowly forms of animal life. At one 
time it is more like a multicellular protozoon — a mere 
ball of cells — than a human being ; at another it sug- 
gests a worm-like creature; later it has many points 
in common with the fish; and later still it is more like 
an anthropoid ape than a child of man. So that, ap- 
parently, every child climbs its own evolutionary lad- 
der in the space of a few months, covering the ground 
in its brief antenatal existence which it took its an- 
cestor, the first man, many million years to traverse. 
But it must be clearly understood that at no point, 
were the development of the human embryo arrested, 
could it be deflected into a worm, a fish, or an ape. Hu- 
manity is impressed upon it from the beginning. 

It must not be forgotten that the doctrine of evo- 
lution is still a hypothesis, but it is a hypothesis 
so well supported by accumulated evidence as to have 
become to all intents an established fact, and onlv 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN 33 

a very few now question its validity. One of its most 
characteristic features is its fairness. It offers a log- 
ical explanation, not only of progress and survival, 
but also of failure and extermination among the va- 
rious species of living things. One may attempt to 
draw a picture to illustrate the evolutionary principle 
in action; but no scheme mapped out with ordinary 
lines can give a correct idea of how progress has been 
achieved, not constantly and rapidly, but little by little, 
by a hard-won step forward here, a retrogression there, 
the possible blotting out of a promising line at one 
place, and the coming into prominence of another else- 
where. The spectacle is a dramatic one, and only 
a genius could have recognized it. 

Emphasis is too often laid upon a wrong view of the 
struggle for existence. The battle has not always been 
to the strong. Species of animals that, in virtue of 
their weapons of offense and defense, and their gigantic 
muscular development, ought to have survived if the 
struggle had been one of brute force and brute force 
alone, are altogether extinct. When one studies the 
matter closely, one is led to the conclusion that it is 
not brute strength which is the aim of life, but the de- 
velopment of mind. Most, if not all, 6i the creatures 
that have survived to our day have won through be- 
cause of some little advantage in instinct or intelli- 
gence. If we give due weight to this aspect of the 
matter we shall, I think, be able to overcome one of the 
chief practical objections that has been advanced 
against the doctrine of evolution, namely, the almost 
incalculable length of time which the process of 
evolution requires. Morphological and structural 
changes brought about by environment are very slow 
to appear and to become established in the stem of 



34» THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the species. But instinctive or intelligent adaptations 
would beget new functions ; and function can rapidly 
alter preexisting structures for its own ends. 

A widespread misconception regarding evolution 
is that it claims to prove that man is descended di- 
rectly from some living form of ape. This idea has 
produced a sense of revulsion in many minds ; but it is 
quite erroneous. Certainly man is derived from a 
common stem with some of the apes, but in the remote 
antiquity of prehistoric ages ; and since he left the 
stem he has developed steadily along his own spe- 
cialized line, while his ape relations have lagged be- 
hind. If one may be allowed to make a comparison, 
one might say that the common fount of life is like an 
immense lake high up between two guardian hills. 
From one end of the lake two streams escape, which 
represent the plant stem and the animal stem. If we 
follow the animal stream we discover ere long that it is 
giving off little branches. There are branches to rep- 
resent the jelly-fish, the vertebrate fishes, the amphibia, 
and so on. After traveling for a short distance a 
very large daughter stream breaks away, and when 
it has flowed for a little space it is divided into two 
rivers by some intervening rock upon the hillside. 
One of these rivers represents the ape stem; the other 
is the stream of the human race. Though now sep- 
arated from each other, they travel on side by side 
through many an unmeasured aeon, parallel but di- 
vided, taking up from their environment this and that 
quality, deflected here, steadily progressing there, and 
always moving onward. As they flow on they begin 
to diverge, and the human stream gradually acquires 
a greater velocity than the ape stream and passes on 
far ahead of it into the limitless valley of opportunity, 
while the ape stream lags behind, held in the tangle 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN 35 

of a morass. This is a truer and a less repulsive pic- 
ture of the evolution of man than that disordered 
dream which imagines that he has sprung straight 
from the loins of an ape, and, taking to the trees to en- 
sure his safety against some rapacious beast, has sat in 
the attitude of Rodin's " Thinker " until his caudal ap- 
pendage atrophied from disuse, and the hair fell from 
his body through much cogitation. 

Modern opinion has modified somewhat the views 
held as to the factors which produce evolutionary 
changes. At one time it was believed that the chief 
variations were due to external causes such as environ- 
ment. Now, many hold that besides the influence of 
environment we must take account of influences work- 
ing from within the organism outwards. In his Last 
Words on Great Issues Dr. Beattie Crozier says: 
" Whatever subsidiary influence the environment may 
have had on the evolution of the forms of plant and 
animal life, an inner organizing principle which keeps 
possible variations within strict and definite limits, 
not to be overborne, must be assumed as primary and 
fundamental." 

It is altogether wrong to imagine that the influence 
of the directing Mind behind the Universe is ruled out 
by the evolutionary theory. To discover the plan on 
which a great cathedral has been constructed is not to 
dispense with the architect and the builder. The 
Mind responsible for those chemical affinities and molec- 
ular combinations which resulted in the appearance 
of the first living protoplasmic cell was also respon- 
sible for endowing the protoplasm with the power of 
adapting itself to its environment. So far as we can 
judge of any of His operations in nature, the Creator 
invariably makes use of what we call secondary causes. 
He is throughout self-consistent, and Darwin's demon- 



36 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

stration of man's evolutionary ascension should not 
shake the belief of any one in the overruling and con- 
trolling influence of the Mind which fore-ordained and 
foreknew that out of the speck of protoplasm in the la- 
goon at the foot of the hill creature after creature 
should evolve, and, molded by environment, struggle on, 
until at last man should stand erect upon the sum- 
mit. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE DOMINANT ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE IN THE 
EVOLUTION OF MAN 

" Mind is not matter nor from matter, but 
Above, leave matter then, proceed with mind! 
Man's be the mind recognized at the height; — 
Leave the inferior minds and look at man." 

Robert Browning. The Ring and the Book. 

When one surveys the geological records of the his- 
tory of life upon the earth one discovers that many an- 
imals and many complete species are now extinct. 
Some of these animals were gigantic creatures, like 
the iguanodon. Others, like the saber-toothed tiger, 
possessed weapons that should have served them well 
in the struggle for life. But the ichthyosaurus, the 
diplodocus, the dinotherium and the mastodon have 
all vanished, leaving no record except a heap of bones, 
or the impress of their skeleton in a rock that was 
once clay, from which the scientist has been able to re- 
construct models bearing some resemblance to their an- 
cient prototypes. Those species which have survived 
owe their survival to peculiar faculties of adaptation 
to changing circumstances, to the possibility of ac- 
quiring adequate food, and to the possession of one 
or other characteristic that enabled them to defend 
themselves. The tortoise has survived probably be- 
cause it was provided with a carapace, a shell-like os- 
seous roof under which it could hide itself ; the elephant 
owes its survival to its strength, its swiftness, its in- 
telligence, and the fact that, unlike the mammoth, its 
body was not out of proportion to the amount of food 
it could acquire; the lion and the tiger owe their sur- 

37 



38 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

vival to their strength, agility, claws and teeth, and 
to their courage and cunning, which are mental qual- 
ities ; while the venomous reptiles survived because of 
their poison-glands. 

In the whole history of mankind there is no moment 
more dramatic than that in which man first found him- 
self alone in the world of monsters. Naked and un- 
armed, physically inferior to many of the animals 
around him, with neither rending tooth nor tearing 
claw, he was to all outward appearance at a tremen- 
dous disadvantage. But he was, even in those prime- 
val days, a creature of immense potentialities. He 
did not skulk and hide like some craven afraid to face 
his destiny; but he raised himself on his feet, stood 
splendid in his manhood, and dared to look with un- 
daunted eye on the world before him, with some faint 
glimmering in his mind of the consciousness that to 
him it was given to be a king. 

Structurally he was intimately connected with the 
whole vertebrate kingdom around him. He had not 
a bone or a muscle, an organ or a sense which was not 
already typified and existing in some of the animals 
amongst which he found himself. In the mammalian 
kingdom the resemblance between himself and the other 
members became closer and closer. Bone for bone, 
organ for organ, sense for sense, he resembled them 
so closely that among the higher apes creatures were 
to be found that anatomically and morphologically 
could hardly be distinguished from him. As has al- 
ready been pointed out, when one reviews the whole 
panorama of living things one finds that through it all 
runs a great and almost uninterrupted principle of 
continuity. It is a far cry from the unicellular proto- 
zoa to man; but right up, through the long ladder, 
there is a series of intermediate steps which proves his 



DOMINANT ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE 39 

intimate relationship with the whole world of living 
things. Then near the top of the ladder there comes a 
long and impassable gap. Anatomically the gap is 
negligible; but mentally it is insuperable. 

The central nervous system of man resembles closely 
that found in the higher animals. They have the 
same senses, often better developed than his own. He 
has not the vision of the eagle or the hawk, nor are 
his senses of smell and hearing developed so highly as 
they are in the dog. But the functions of his brain 
are of an infinitely higher order than those possessed 
by any other animal, and it is in the domain of func- 
tion rather than in that of morphology that the chief 
differences between man and the animals are to be 
found. Haeckel, in reviewing the results of anthro- 
pogeny, said : " Within the limits of this small group 
of animals [the apes of the old world] we found the 
structural differences between the lower and higher 
catarrhine apes — for instance, the baboon and the 
gorilla — to be much greater than the difference be- 
tween the anthropoid apes and man." 1 But we must 
be careful to note that this statement only holds good 
if it is limited to anatomical details. It has nothing 
to do with the matter of intelligence. There is a huge 
gulf between the intelligence of the highest anthro- 
poid ape and the lowest type of the human species. 
At its worst, provided the underlying brain is sound, 
the latter is progressively improvable; the former re- 
mains stagnant. In man something has been super- 
added. He is become a living soul, quickened to a 
larger mental and spiritual life by the breath of God. 

Some physiologists are prepared to go the length of 
saying that there is an unbroken continuity of nerv- 
ous function which links the lowest living creature 

i The Evolution of Man, chap. XXX. 



40 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

with man, the highest. They suggest that the chain be- 
gins in simple reflex actions, such as the protrusion or 
withdrawal of a protoplasmic offshoot from the amoeba 
under the influence of a stimulus, and proceeds grad- 
ually up to the higher psychic operations of the human 
mind; and in recent years an attempt has been made 
to discover in the tropisms of plants and animals the 
roots of the instincts, habits, and conduct of all living 
creatures, including man. A tropism may be defined 
as a simple response to an external stimulus. Most 
flowers turn to the light: they are helio- or photo- 
tropic. Moths and flies are phototropic; a worm, 
on the other hand, shrinks from the light: it is nega- 
tively phototropic. Lowly organized animals are led 
by a chemical impulse to their food. They are chemo- 
tropic. The branches of a banyan-tree turn to the 
earth: they are geotropic. The explanation of 
these phenomena has been found in chemical activity. 
When light falls on a moth it is said that certain 
changes occur in its body. These chemical changes 
stimulate muscular movement. Without any will of 
its own, the moth is driven by the reflex beating of its 
wings straight to the source of light, and perishes in 
the flames. 

These are interesting and seductive theories, and 
from them has been built an elaborate superstructure 
of hypothesis that would gladly claim as its coping- 
stone the complex manifestations of the intelligence 
of man. But, in man, thought and conduct cannot be 
reduced to purely physico-chemical changes in nerve- 
cells. As the physiologist advances his claims, the 
psychologist seems sometimes to abandon his positions 
with undue haste. Even when the physiologist has 
been able to see and determine the precise chemical 
changes which occur in the cells of the brain during 



DOMINANT ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE 41 

an act of thought, he will not be any nearer the solu- 
tion of the matter. Brain changes probably do ac- 
company every act of thought, for the brain is the 
physical organ of the mind. But the mind is not the 
brain, and no physico-chemical account of the metab- 
olism or katabolism of nerve tissue will ever explain 
the genesis of an abstract idea, or account for a con- 
ception of moral right or moral wrong. One must ever 
guard against confusing a psychic act with its phys- 
iological concomitants. 

It has long been the custom to deny intelligence to 
the lower animals, and to confine any mental life of 
which they are capable to the domain of instinct. I 
do not feel we are justified in thus restricting their 
mental activities. Any one who has read Fabre's 
marvelous records of his studies of insects must for- 
ever feel a difficulty in drawing a hard and fast line 
between the manifestations of instinct and the opera- 
tions of intelligence. And we cannot fairly deny to 
some of the higher animals a few of those qualities of 
mind that are often regarded as the prerogative of 
man. For instance, who will deny that a fox-terrier 
or a collie is capable of showing affection, fear, and 
memory, or that a sheep cannot express in its agonized 
bleating some shadow of the emotion of love for its 
offspring. I remember, as a little child, hearing all 
day long the plaintive bleating of the lambs that had 
been separated from their mothers and driven up to 
the high pastures in the late days of July, and the 
responsive, deeper-toned calling of the ewes in the low- 
lands, as they wandered nervously and perturbed 
about the field in a vain endeavor to get back to their 
young. There was some other note in the crying of 
the lambs than a mere desire for food, and there was 
more in the mothers' tremulous response than the pain 



42 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of an overfilled udder. It was the oldest and biggest 
emotion in the world; and, with the clear intuition of 
a little child, I heard and understood. 

We cannot by an arbitrary and hard and fast de- 
cision deny intelligence to all the lower animals. The 
greater part of their lives is, certainly, controlled by 
instinct, or unreflecting impulse to action. But man 
also lives much of his life instinctively: he, too, acts 
upon impulses which he does not weigh or analyze, so 
that, at certain points, the mental life of animals and 
the mental life of man come into close touch. But 
there is a great difference. A fundamental distinction 
between instinct and intelligence is that the former 
does not enable those creatures whose sole guiding 
light it is to adjust their conduct in such a way as to 
deal with unexpected and unwonted experiences, while 
the latter helps those that possess it to do so. 

Not long ago I had the opportunity of observing 
this difference in operation. I saw a long line of cat- 
erpillars, which had just emerged from the nest 
in which they had been hatched, crawling down the 
trunk of a tall pine-tree. There were 156 cater- 
pillars in the procession, and they were progress- 
ing in single file, each head in contact with the 
posterior extremity of the one immediately in front. 
The long row of caterpillars suggested a line of rail- 
way carriages coupled together. By way of ex- 
periment I removed two caterpillars from the chain, 
and watched to see what would happen. Obviously 
this was an experience which must have been met 
with by many generations of their ancestors, for 
their instinct, which is automatic habit ingrained 
in the species through custom, taught them how to 
deal with this emergency. The last caterpillar at the 
upper end of the lower half of the broken line ceased 



DOMINANT ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE 43 

moving. Apparently it knew that the caterpillar 
which had been clinging to its tail had lost its hold. 
Rapidly a message passed along the line, and soon the 
lower half was stationary throughout its whole length. 
The leader of the upper half, robbed of his guide, in- 
stinctively moved his head from side to side, making 
the arc of a small circle as he continued to crawl 
down the tree-trunk. In this way he made sure of not 
missing the tail of the rearguard in the lower half of 
the procession if it should come anywhere within the 
arc of the circle. In a moment or two, during which 
time the lower column remained at a halt, the upper 
and the lower line succeeded in getting into touch, and 
the whole procession at once began to move again. 
Instinct had enabled the creatures to overcome this 
difficulty, which must many a time have called for a 
solution from their ancestors. When the leader of the 
reformed train reached the ground he set off boldly, with 
his followers in single file behind him. Near the tree 
there was a small slope, about four inches high. Down 
this he moved, and then, making a detour, proceeded to 
describe the arc of a circle in his progress. Unfor- 
tunately the rate at which he was leading the van 
brought him back close to the tree just as the last 
caterpillar was crawling from it, and the head of the 
leader came into contact with the body of the last of 
the line. Originally, as the ribbon of creatures came 
down the tree, these two were some twelve feet apart. 
Now they were touching each other, and by that in- 
stinct which apparently drives a migrating caterpillar 
to attach itself to the terminal extremity of any other 
caterpillar it comes across, the first laid hold of the 
hinder end of the last, and a rough circle was com- 
pleted. This is probably a rare and unusual expe- 
rience in the life-history of a nest of caterpillars, and 



44 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ancestral tradition had not supplied them with any 
means of recognizing that something was wrong, nor 
endowed them with the instinct necessary to deal with 
such a contingency. Intelligence would have supplied 
a solution: for instinct, there was none; and the tor- 
tuous circle continued to move round and round, mak- 
ing no progress, for nearly two hours. At the end of 
that time exhaustion, and possibly the cold wind which 
had sprung up, brought the circling ribbon to a halt. 
Then one caterpillar rolled over. This was an ac- 
cident, and not an instinctive act, as it happened to 
have halted on the slope already mentioned. As it 
rolled over, the pull of its separation caused several 
more to lose their balance, and they tumbled over as 
well. It is said that the occasion frequently makes 
the man, but this time it did not make the caterpillar, 
for, though the circle was now broken the caterpillar 
at the head of the line did not rise to the height of 
his opportunity and assume the role of leader. In- 
stead, he remained still. After a time other breaks oc- 
curred in the line, but not one of the creatures as- 
sumed any directive powers. Instead of being a com- 
munal society with a definite end in view, this collection 
of caterpillars became an impotent crowd. As they 
crawled about, apparently without any determined 
aim, singly or in couples, they met other members of 
their family ; but no attempt was made to reform the 
line, and when they came in contact they remained 
huddled together in a confused heap, perplexed, baffled, 
and beaten by the first problem in their adventure of 
life. They presented a singular and instructive ex- 
ample of the limitations and insufficiency of unaided in- 
stinct. Next morning many lay dead. A few robust 
survivors had succeeded in taking to earth under some 
loose sand. The dead lay there as a witness to that 



DOMINANT ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE 45 

provision of nature by which those creatures endowed 
only with instinct are produced in enormous numbers 
so that the inevitable casualties which must come 
to them through their lack of intelligence may not 
lead to their total extirpation. 

Intellectually the lowest member of the human 
species is infinitely superior to the highest animal, and 
it is to his intelligence that man owes his survival. 
Though he was not provided by nature with weapons 
of defense other than his hands, he had the intellect 
which enabled him to fabricate weapons and tools. 
He was sufficiently intelligent to plan and carry into 
effect a combined offensive with bow and arrow, club 
and spear, and catapult, against those animals that 
lay in wait to destroy him. There is no exact parallel 
to this in animal life. A tiger may lie in wait for its 
victim, or a pack of hungry wolves may band them- 
selves together to pursue a fleeing horseman; but no 
animals have ever taken counsel together to plan a 
campaign against the human species, to arm them- 
selves with special weapons, to devise strategy, and 
so to arrange their tactics as to meet possible con- 
tingencies. It was man's intelligence, and not his 
brute strength, which made him a doughty opponent. 

It taught him not only how to slay those wild beasts 
that would have slain him, but also how to establish 
a growing ascendancy over the less ferocious creatures. 
Those that could be of use to him he captured and 
trained. He made beasts of burden of the horse, the 
mule, the ass, the camel, the elephant, and the ox. 
Then he learned what vegetable foods were neces- 
sary to sustain life, and he found that it was easier to 
transplant and cultivate them than go to seek them 
far afield when he required them. No animal has ever 
shown exactly this kind of provision, even though 



46 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the ants keep dairy farms of aphides to supply their 
young with " milk," and some wasps keep a larder filled 
with insects which they paralyze, but do not kill, with 
their stings. But no animal has ever cultivated a gar- 
den to give itself sustenance. 

Over all animals man has a great advantage. He 
is able to make use of the accumulated experience of 
his predecessors. The comb of the bee and the social 
life of the ant are, so far as we can tell, the same now 
as they were a million years ago. Certainly they have 
not altered within the memory of man. It may be 
that the hexagonal formation of each cell in the comb, 
and the communal laws that regulate the life of the 
ant are, for their purpose, perfect and require no al- 
teration. But such permanence and un changeability 
would not suit the restless intelligence of man, who 
is ever seeking to alter, adapt, and improve. Gen- 
erations of animals come and go, and, except in so far 
as it becomes ingrained in the stem of the species, leave 
no record of experience from which their successors 
may win profit. But no generation of men vanishes 
from the earth without leaving some tradition, either 
oral or written, which may be of service to those who 
come after. Thus it is that man's progress has been 
rapid. Each successive generation has laid up for 
it a well-stored depository of experiences which en- 
ables it to begin where its predecessor left off, and it 
is man's intellectual capacity for making use of these 
hoarded experiences which has helped to lift him to 
the position in the animal kingdom which he occupies 
to-day. All this would have been impossible if man 
had not had the gift of speech. To this gift of speech 
Max Miiller attributed the highest importance. Ac- 
cording to him, " The one great barrier between the 
brute and man is language. Man speaks ; and no 



DOMINANT ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE 47 

brute has ever uttered a word. Language is our Rubi- 
con, and no brute has ever crossed it." This is, per- 
haps, a somewhat strong declaration. We may not 
be able to write down and classify the calls of the birds, 
and the different tones in the bark of a dog. But any 
attentive student of nature will at once admit that 
there is a difference, appreciable by their kind, in the 
quality of the love-call of a bird, and the plaintive note 
of one whose nest has been robbed; and there is a 
lively distinction between the bark of a dog which is 
angry and that of one which is barking from the sheer 
joy of life. But, be that as it may, speech, which is 
a gift of the intellect, has been of incalculable value 
to man. It has enabled him to express himself, to 
communicate his experiences, to cultivate social inter- 
course, to guide and instruct those who follow him. 
And though, undoubtedly, example is better than pre- 
cept, a little precept is sometimes needed to call at- 
tention to the example. The power of speech was, 
probably, in some sort, man's from the beginning. At 
first it would be little more than a medley of imitative 
sounds; but from that point the human vocabulary 
would rapidly grow by diurnal accretions, by the ad- 
dition of names applicable to articles of food, and the 
thousand and one things with which man came into 
contact in his daily life. Later, it would be enriched 
by terms applicable to abstract qualities, until the 
mouthful of onomatopoeic words with which he began 
to express himself had grown into an opulent medium 
through which a Shakespeare could express all human 
laughter, all human aspiration, and all human tears. 

In virtue of his intelligence man's conquests con- 
tinued to extend. Some of the forces of nature he 
made his vassals. He captured the wind in the sails 
of his boats, and he made it turn his millstone. He 



48 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

also made use of the power of running water, har- 
nessing it to his own ends ; and he discovered how to 
light a fire and keep it burning. An ancient fable 
of mythology tells how Prometheus stole fire from the 
gods, and as a punishment was condemned to a cruel 
and enduring torture. The fable had its roots in the 
wonder of primitive man at the miracle of fire. A 
power so strange must originally have come from the 
gods ; it could not have been born on earth ! It would 
be interesting to know how man first discovered fire; 
whether it came from the lightning and set some pri- 
meval forest ablaze, whether it poured in burning lava 
from some volcano, or whether, like so many other rev- 
olutionary discoveries, it came by what we call acci- 
dent. But, however it came, the man who first rec- 
ognized even in a remote way its value and its infinite 
possibilities was a genius — the lineal ancestor of Gali- 
leo, Newton, Kepler, Kelvin, Madame Curie and Mar- 
coni. The first man who rubbed two sticks together till 
one of them glowed made possible the railway train and 
the Atlantic liner. It was a great feat of intelligence 
to recognize the potentialities of fire. No animal, be- 
low the level of man, has ever done that. Many ani- 
mals will warm themselves before a fire, and appreciate 
the benefits that flow from it; but no animal, less 
than man, has ever succeeded, by taking thought, in 
producing a fire, or even in keeping a fire burning 
once it has been lit. The early date at which the 
value of fire was recognized by man proves that, even 
in primeval times, there were men of genius. Man's 
intellectual capacity has changed but little in the ages. 
The quality of mind was there from the beginning. 
Much of our recent progress in the field of intellectual 
accomplishment is due, not to any modern superiority 
in mental equipment, but to the fact that nowadays 



DOMINANT ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE 49 

the mind has more to work upon. It has more ac- 
cumulated observations from which to start ; more 
accessories to help towards fresh conquests. In these 
days we can call to our service invisible forces such 
as electricity, or the emanations of radium, and we 
flatter ourselves that our intellects have enabled us 
to secure great triumphs over the secret forces of na- 
ture. And we are right to do so ; but, in taking credit 
for our age as a golden era of discovery, we owe a 
grateful and appreciative thought to the genius of the 
cave-dweller who first taught his fellows the secret of 
fire. 

Mind has always been true to itself. As far back 
as we have any record we find that man was directing 
his intellectual powers to the study of the Universe. 
He was groping through the mysteries toward tne 
light. Much of the work of the Chaldean astronomers, 
and the science of the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, 
is lost in the mist of unchronicled antiquity. But 
enough has come down to us to show that, even in those 
remote ages, man was using his intelligence to ques- 
tion the infinite. He was seeking to understand; and 
though many of the ideas formulated by those early 
scientists seem to us, in a more enlightened age, absurd 
and fantastic, they were, in some sort, the founda- 
tions of that edifice of knowledge in whose shadow we 
live to-day. 

His intellectual superiority is the great factor 
which differentiates man from other animals, and it fs 
the chief cause of his evolutionary progress. We can- 
not deny a measure of intelligence to some animals, 
but there is a profound difference in degree, and an 
immense and almost incalculable difference in quality. 
Whatever mental life the brutes possess tends to 
remain stereotyped. Their intellectual development 



50 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

soon touches its zenith, and remains fixed. In man the 
intellectual powers, great though they were in the 
beginning, are improvable as well as progressive. 
There is no standing still. The individual mind im- 
proves, the intellectual life of the race progresses. 
The intelligence of the brute and the intellect of man 
are both stable, but in a different sense. The former 
is stable like a rock set in the mountain side: the lat- 
ter is stable like a swiftly moving aeroplane. One is 
stagnant and uniform; the other is in a condition of 
progressive movement. This gives to the mental life 
of man an indefinite potentiality. All his abiding 
triumphs are due to his intelligence. It has 
taught him to cultivate the earth; to win from 
its heart metals with which to fashion weapons and 
tools ; to make implements ; to invent machines ; to 
employ the forces of nature for his own purposes ; to 
defend himself against the attacks of animals larger 
and stronger than himself. It is strange that the only 
beasts of prey against which civilized man now re- 
quires to guard himself are the infinitely little ones — 
the microbes of disease. But by the application of 
his intelligence he is daily making further conquests 
over their domain, and in the fullness of time he will 
doubtless succeed in protecting himself against their 
attacks, however subtle. 

To the intelligence of man we owe all we know of 
science, and all the arts we practice. It has helped 
him to read some of the laws by which our little cor- 
ner of the Universe is governed; and it has enabled 
him to conceive of infinity in time and space, that 
colossal mystery of unbeginning and unending dura- 
tion and immensity that he can guess at but cannot 
understand. And because he is gifted with intelligence 
he has been able to speculate on the past and the future 



DOMINANT ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE 51 

of his kind. He can appreciate the ideal and has 
elaborated social and moral schemes whereby to in- 
crease his own happiness, establish his security, and 
help himself and those who follow him along the path 
of progress. It is not alone through the treasures of 
inventive genius which one generation bequeathes to 
another that man progresses. His most rapid prog- 
ress is attributable to the fact that the mind-culture 
of one era passes on to the next. Anatomical and 
morphological changes may require a million years for 
their development; social and cultural changes may 
be impressed upon the individual and established in the 
race within a life-time. And it is this adaptability, 
this acquisitiveness of new culture and new ideals 
which confers on the human mind one of its most 
infinite potentialities. 

His mental faculties have enabled man to evolve a 
philosophy to explain existence; to recognize moral 
duties and to appreciate moral values. Intelligence 
has been the chief factor in hastening his development, 
and it is only when he is false to the light of intelli- 
gence that man sinks to the level of the brutes. Long 
ago, if he had followed the guidance of intelli- 
gence, he would have learned that war is a hideous 
wrong, morally as well as from the point of evolution. 
In these civilized days it is an offense to God, and its 
continued existence depends on a crude misinterpreta- 
tion of one of the doctrines of developmental progress. 
There is little doubt that when Germany, for more than 
forty years, was steeling herself and preparing for the 
great conflict in which we are now engaged, she was 
basing her policy upon a wrong idea of the " survival 
of the fittest." Although one of the most intellectual 
nations in the world, she failed to recognize that the 
doctrine of the survival of the fittest does not mean 



52 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

that in days past one species set itself against another 
to conquer or to exterminate. Such are the bald terms 
of her interpretation. Rightly understood, and as 
Darwin understood it, the principle means, simply, 
that those species survived which were most capable 
of adapting themselves to their circumstances. It 
never meant internecine and bloody warfare between 
species and species. War is retrogressive and anti- 
evolutionary because it brings premature death to 
many of the finest of a race, and tends to leave to the 
weaklings the continuation of their kind. As waged 
now, with long-distance artillery, machine-guns and 
rifles, it is more opposed than ever to the principles 
of evolution. Evolution has worked by and towards 
intelligence. But a shell fired by a stupid soldier whose 
only knowledge is the art of war, or a bullet from the 
rifle of a simple village lad, may kill a potential Shake- 
speare, a Newton or a Darwin. In so far as it makes 
brute force rather than intelligence the chief weapon 
in its offensive, it is false to all ideals of national 
progress. In days past, one race of men established 
its ascendancy over another by virtue of its higher 
brain power. It was brain power, and not brute force, 
that was intended to be the discriminating factor be- 
tween the different races of mankind. And there 
is little doubt that if Germany had relied solely 
upon the intellectual activities of her people, de- 
voted to the study of science, the application of 
scientific methods to manufacture, and the intelli- 
gent fostering of commerce, she would in a generation 
have established for herself that ascendancy among 
the nations that has been her ambition. Instead of 
this peaceful conquest, which was within her grasp, 
she has put back possibly for centuries the hope of 
realizing her dream. 



CHAPTER V 

THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy." 

Shakespeare. Hamlet. 

In a poetic hyperbole Tennyson spoke of Nature as 
" red in tooth and claw with ravine." She is, however, 
the universal mother, and within her domain the bal- 
ance between life and death is held firmly, with a bias 
toward the side of life. 

To ensure the continuation and increase of their 
kind, many animals are endowed with the most ex- 
traordinary fertility. This is more particularly true 
of the fishes. Every female herring is potentially the 
mother of an incalculable number of offspring, and 
it has been estimated that a couple of cod-fish allowed to 
breed perfectly freely would, if all their progeny came 
to maturity and multiplied at the same rate, fill the 
sea in less than ten years with a solid mass of fish. 
The more highly specialized an animal becomes the 
less is its fertility. The horse is much less prolific 
than the rat, and the cow than the rabbit; and the 
fecundity of human beings, which is potentially very 
considerable, is comparatively limited. Two princi- 
ples seem to underlie the law that controls fertility. 
Animals whose offspring are subjected to great risks 
are very fertile, so that, in spite of all accidents, a 
sufficient number of young may survive to ensure the 
continuance of the species. 

53 



54 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

When the dependence of the offspring upon the 
parents is prolonged, as is the case in the human 
species, fertility is sharply controlled. Once life has 
been achieved it is protected, and the devices whereby 
this protection is ensured are among the most beauti- 
ful and remarkable features of nature. Frequently 
the protection begins while life is still in the potential 
stage. We find an example of this in the protective 
coloring of the plovers' eggs, which are hardly dis- 
tinguishable from the shallow bed of soil and debris on 
which they are deposited. A casual wanderer through 
an April field may pass man}' a clutch of plovers' eggs 
without detecting them. 

The young of many sea-birds resemble their sur- 
roundings so closely in color as easily to escape the 
eye of the fowler or the marauding bird of prey. 
Many insects, too, have the advantage of protective 
coloring, so that they seem to be a part of the plant 
upon which they rest or feed. Some butterflies have 
wings so perfectly tinged and so exquisitely veined 
that they are distinguished with the utmost difficulty 
from leaves. Certain insects, perfectly innocuous and 
not provided with any weapons either of offense or de- 
fense, escape destruction because they resemble closely 
insects armed with powerful and painful stings. The 
principle of protective coloring is also met with among 
the higher animals. The mice of the Sinai peninsula 
are fawn-colored; the fur of the hares on the granite 
hills of Galloway turns to a silver gray in winter time ; 
and the striped markings of the zebra enable it to es- 
cape detection among the long grasses of its natural 
haunts. Protective coloring is only one of the many 
artifices employed in nature for the preservation of life. 
The offensive odors of the skunk and the musk-rat are 
protective devices. The exigencies of modern warfare 




THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 55 

have compelled our Navy to take a lesson in protection 
from the well-known artifice of the cuttle-fish. This 
creature, when pursued by some carnivorous monster 
of the sea, endeavors to elude its enemy by discharging 
an inky fluid which acts much in the same way as the 
smoke-screen with which a merchant-vessel or even a 
torpedo-boat envelopes itself in the endeavor to ward 
off the attack of a submarine or other hostile craft. 
The whole science of " camouflage " is a war-time elab- 
oration of observations derived from the study of pro- 
tection in nature. 

But, interesting as are the protective devices met 
with in the lower realms of nature, it is when we 
approach the study of defense in the human economy 
that we discover phenomena of singular complexity 
and extraordinary efficiency. 

The whole mechanism of the human body seems to 
have been elaborated with a special view to the pro- 
tection of the life which animates it. 

The chief organs necessary for the maintenance of 
life are protected by walls of bone. The brain, the 
most important organ, is walled in by the skull ; but, in 
addition, it is covered by three membranes of varying 
thickness, the outer of which is distinctly protective in 
function, and it is, further, surrounded by a thin layer 
of fluid, which, in addition to other functions, acts as a 
cushion that not only absorbs the violence of any blow 
applied to the skull, but also distributes it so that the 
force of the impact is not localized. 

The spinal cord, the great distributing tract for 
nerve energy and the channel by which nerve messages 
from without reach the central nervous system, is also 
protected by bone, as it runs down from the posterior 
part of the brain through a tunnel formed by the 
bodies and arches of the vertebrae. In front it is 



56 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 






guarded by thick and strong masses of bone — the 
vertebral bodies; laterally and posteriorly it is pro- 
tected by the neural arches, reinforced by tough lig- 
aments and massive muscles. Between each vertebral 
body is a cartilaginous buffer, the inter-vertebral disc, 
which absorbs shock, and prevents the base of the skull 
from being shattered by the impact of the vertebral 
column when a man falls from a height upon his feet. 

The heart and lungs, which are organs essential for 
life, are also protected by bony and muscular walls; 
and most of the great blood-vessels are well concealed. 

Highly developed organs of special sense like the 
eye and the internal ear, are also well protected by 
bone. In addition, the eye is guarded by moving cur- 
tains of skin, the eyelids, which are quick to close au- 
tomatically when any foreign body approaches them; 
and the secretions of the lachrymal, or tear glands, 
make a valiant endeavor to wash from the eyeball any 
deleterious foreign agent that may have lodged there. 

The nasal cavities are supplied with fleshy cushions, 
richly perfused with blood which warms the inhaled air 
before it passes on into the lungs, and in addition the 
vibrissas or hairs in the nostrils act as a kind of coarse 
filter and remove from the air some of the dust and 
germs which it contains. 

The whole outer surface of the body is covered by 
a highly organized integument, the skin, which con- 
sists of several layers, and which performs many func- 
tions necessary for the proper continuance of life. 
One of its chief functions is to act as a first line of 
defense against the invasion of germs from without. 
The skin is to the body what the sea is to Britain. 
The best protection a surgeon or pathologist can have 
against blood-poisoning is a sound integument. No 
germ of disease can find its way through an intact 



THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 57 

skin, but a small and invisible abrasion may throw 
open the portal to death. The war has increased our 
appreciation of this fact. In the first winter of the 
campaign it was found that a number of soldiers who 
were admitted to hospitals suffering from " trench 
foot," developed tetanus or "lockjaw" and died. In 
some cases no break in the skin was discoverable; or, 
at most, there may have been a small blister or a crack 
between the toes. Now it is the custom to administer 
anti-tetanus serum to all soldiers with " trench foot " 
in whom there is reason to believe that the skin is not 
intact, and, as a result, tetanus as a complication of 
" trench foot " has almost completely disappeared. 

The mechanism by which the temperature of a nor- 
mal healthy adult is kept constant, within certain well- 
defined limits, is also a provision for protection. The 
normal temperature of an adult is 98.4° Fahrenheit, 
and the balance is very finely adjusted. Violent mus- 
cular exercise tends to raise the temperature, and 
if there were no temperature-regulating or com- 
pensating system violent exercise would produce 
pyrexia or fever. But the stimulus of exercise in- 
creases the rapidity of the heart's action, and con- 
sequently the blood is driven more rapidly through the 
blood-vessels. In this way, in a given time, a larger 
quantity of blood passes through the capillary vessels 
in the skin. The skin is a great radiator of heat; 
the sweat-glands in the skin secrete copiously; the 
evaporation of the perspiration tends to cool the skin; 
and a cooled skin helps to keep the temperature of the 
blood which is circulating through it at or near the 
normal. In addition, there is in the brain what 
is known as the temperature-regulating center, which 
is to the temperature of the body what a " gov- 
ernor " is to a steam-engine. Any lesion in the imme- 



58 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 






diate neighborhood of this center throws it out of 
gear, and the temperature runs amok. When func- 
tioning properly it helps to keep the temperature 
at the normal. 

The statement that the blood is the life is sufficiently 
ancient to be entitled to respect, even though physiolog- 
ically it is not quite true. The blood is of prime im- 
portance to the economy, and in health it is kept at a 
standard which is recognized as the normal. The 
blood consists of two elements : one fluid — the serum — 
the other solid, and consisting of the blood corpuscles 
of various kinds. The concentration of the serum and 
the quantity of salt it contains is practically constant, 
and the balance is so delicately held that if, by artifi- 
cial means, any alteration is produced it is speedily 
rectified by the bodily mechanism, provided that, in the 
meantime, the patient does not succumb. 

In health the solid constituents of the blood vary 
within strictly narrow limits ; but they have the power 
of adjusting themselves to new conditions. For in- 
stance, if a person who lives habitually at the sea- 
level is transported to the summit of a lofty mountain 
and lives there for some time, certain changes occur in 
his blood winch enable him to adapt himself to his new 
surroundings. 

On a mountain-top the atmosphere is more rarefied 
than at the sea-level, and consequently it is necessary 
to breathe more rapidly to obtain the same amount of 
oxygen in a given time. The oxygen is conveyed from 
the lungs through the central and peripheral circula- 
tion by the red blood-corpuscles or erythrocytes, each 
of which acts as a sort of cargo-boat, taking up in the 
lungs a load of oxygen, conveying it through the body, 
unloading it where it is required, and bringing back 
to the lungs a freight of carbonic-acid-gas, one of the 



THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 59 

by-products of the activities of life. The whole 
process is a beautiful and fascinating piece of 
physiological adjustment. If we examine with the 
microscope a drop of blood taken from a healthy 
person living at sea-level, we shall find that each cubic 
millimeter of blood contains approximately five million 
red corpuscles. If, after he has resided for several 
days on a mountain-top we again examine his blood, 
we shall find that there has been a striking increase 
in the number of red cells. A moment's thought will 
give a clew to the reason for this adjustment. The 
oxygen of the air has to be conveyed rapidly from the 
lungs to those parts of the body which are crying for 
it. As, at each inspiration, the mountain-dweller can 
obtain only a proportion of the oxygen accessible to 
the dweller at sea-level it is necessary that the trans- 
port of the precious cargo from the lungs to the other 
organs and the periphery should be hastened, and the 
method adopted in the human economy to secure this 
end is to increase the number of cargo-boats. When 
the temporary mountain-dweller returns to the plains 
his superfluous cargo-boats, of which he has no longer 
any need, are scrapped in the ship-breaking yards of 
the liver. 

Again, when a person or animal is bled, a very large 
number of blood-corpuscles are, naturally, lost. The 
economy would suffer and suffer seriously if provision 
had not been made to deal with such a contingency. 
Special glands in the body known as the blood-form- 
ing glands and the red bone-marrow, are thrown into 
activity. They elaborate new red cells rapidly, and 
it is possible, by examining the blood from day to day, 
to estimate the rate at which the damage is being re- 
paired, until the normal is once again reached. If the 
same person or animal is bled on repeated occasions, 



60 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 



and the blood is examined with the microscope at reg- 
ular intervals, it will be found that there is a consid- 
erable speeding-up in the rate at which the loss of red 
cells is made good. We find an interesting parallel 
in our efforts to combat the submarine menace which 
has produced such havoc among our merchant fleet. 
At first we repaired our losses slowly; now there is a 
great speeding-up in our shipbuilding yards, and loss 
and replacement are rapidly being brought into a con- 
dition of balance. 

These phenomena, and many others which might be 
instanced, serve to show how carefully the bodily econ- 
omy has been adjusted to cope with conditions that 
might be deleterious to it, and that possibly would ex- 
tinguish the little spark of life that animates the whole. 

Confirmed supporters of the evolutionary hypothe- 
sis used to point to certain structures in the human 
body which they regarded as functionless remnants of 
organs that had subserved important functions in an- 
imals below the human level, but which in the human 
being were nothing more than vestiges, useless except in 
so far as they indicated the road by which man had 
climbed in his struggle upward to the top of the evolu- 
tionary tree. 

Haeckel laid great stress on the presence in the hu- 
man body of these so-called vestigial parts. He said: 
" They are some of the weightiest proofs of the truth 
of the mechanical conception and the strongest dis- 
proofs of the teleological view. If, as the latter de- 
mands, man or any other organism had been designed 
and fitted for his life-purposes from the start and 
brought into being by a creative act, the existence of 
these rudimentary organs would be an insoluble 
enigma; it would be impossible to understand why the 
Creator had put this useless burden on his creatures 






THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 61 

to walk a path that is in itself by no means easy. But 
the theory of evolution gives the simplest possible ex- 
planation of them. It says: The rudimentary or- 
gans are parts of the body that have fallen into disuse 
in the course of centuries ; they had definite functions 
in our animal ancestors, but have lost their physio- 
logical significance. On account of fresh adaptations 
they have become superfluous, but are transmitted from 
generation to generation by heredity, and gradually 
atrophy." 1 

In making such a sweeping generalization Haeckel 
stumbled into the pit that lies in the way of all " sci- 
entific " partisans, who are tempted to regard the sum- 
total of knowledge accessible at the time they commit 
themselves as the whole truth. If he were alive to-day 
he would be compelled to modify much and retract a 
great deal of what he wrote as to vestigial organs, or 
be laughed out of court. Since he wrote the chapter 
from which the above quotation is taken, some of the 
organs which he instances there as being nothing more 
than vestigial encumbrances have been found to dis- 
charge functions of the highest importance in the hu- 
man economy. He would be a rash man who to-day 
would venture to assert that any organ in the human 
body, however vestigial it may seem, is of no use. 

In the abdominal cavity, hung like an apron in front 
of the intestinal coils, is a structure known as the great 
omentum. Haeckel did not include it in his list of ves- 
tigial remnants ; but others have regarded it as a func- 
tionless structure. It consists of layers of fat, and 
of several layers of peritoneum — the delicate serous 
membrane which is to the contents of the abdominal 
cavity what the pleural membrane is to the lungs. 

For very many years the function of the omentum 

i The Evolution of Man, by Ernst Haeckel, vol. ii. chap. xxx. 



62 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

was quite unknown to physiologists and to surgeons ; 
but within the last decade it has been discovered that 
this unimportant-looking structure, which is in some 
people very rudimentary and might be regarded solely 
as a vestige, can and does perform services of great im- 
portance in the protection of the life of the individual. 
It has been taken out of the list of functionless struc- 
tures, and has attained the dignity of a sobriquet all 
its own — an American surgeon having honored it 
with the title of " The policeman of the peritoneal cav- 
ity." Before the Listerian era major operations on 
abdominal organs were attended by grave risk for the 
patient. Since the introduction of antiseptics into 
surgical practice, and to a much greater degree since 
the aseptic technic grew out of the antiseptic method, 
the surgeon has ceased to regard the abdominal cavity 
as a sphere of operation beyond his reach. As the 
frequency and scope of abdominal operations have in- 
creased the functions of the omentum have gradually 
come to light. 

Inflammatory mischief affecting any organ in the ab- 
dominal cavity may rapidly proceed to a fatal issue 
if it can break through into the general peritoneal cav- 
ity and set up peritonitis or inflammation there. 

Whenever this dread complication threatens, the 
omentum endeavors to avert it. If an inflamed ap- 
pendix is threatening to perforate, or an ulcer of the 
stomach is tending to break through the stomach-wall, 
and so flood the peritoneal cavity with dangerous mi- 
cro-organisms, it is found that the omentum endeavors, 
in a fashion that almost suggests intelligence, to ward 
off this catastrophe. It orientates itself towards the 
inflamed part; it may actually succeed in applying it- 
self to it, and attaching itself to the weak and inflamed 
part with a kind of natural glue. It thus acts as a 



THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 63 

buttress, and lends support to the weakened part at the 
critical moment; and if it is not able to prevent the 
mischief breaking through the wall of the organ in 
which it has begun, it spreads itself out, and, as far 
as it can, shuts out the morbific matter from areas 
where it might exert a more baneful influence. It acts 
like a policeman who hears burglars in a house. He 
approaches the house, and sets a guard over it lest the 
burglars should escape ; and, if they break out, he tries 
to surround them and hem them in lest they be guilty 
of further mischief, and do robbery with violence on 
the highway. 

Far from being a vestigial remnant with no function, 
the omentum is now regarded as the abdominal sur- 
geon's best friend; an assistant upon whose coopera- 
tion he can almost invariably depend. 

The late Professor Elie Metchnikoff has great claims 
to the respect and honor of mankind, for he enriched 
our knowledge by many valuable discoveries. But 
probably the work by which he will be remembered 
when most of his other discoveries have been forgot- 
ten, or attributed to other men, is his long and illu- 
minating series of observations on Phagocytosis. 
From a study of comparative anatomy, he observed 
that certain cells throughout the animal kingdom have 
the power of ingesting or devouring other cells or small 
foreign bodies, and, after ingesting them, in many 
cases they destroy them. He extended his investiga- 
tions to the conditions met with in disease, and he dis- 
covered that the successful resistance of an animal to 
a bacterial infection was in large measure brought about 
through the activity of certain cells which he called 
phagocytes. 

Most of the phagocytic cells are blood-cells ; but 
Metchnikoff discovered that other cells of the body, 



64 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

such as the lining cells of blood-vessels or organs, and 
connective tissue-cells, frequently aid in the process. 

When a micro-organism finds its way through the 
skin into the subjacent tissues it tends to multiply 
rapidly if the conditions are at all favorable. It is 
like an enemy soldier who has broken into a val- 
uable position. If he cannot be dealt with he be- 
comes the precursor of a multitude. Let us imagine 
that the micro-organism finds the new conditions favor- 
able to its growth. It begins to increase in number, 
and in doing so sets up a local disturbance. But be- 
fore long the protective mechanism of the body comes 
into play. The precise channels through which the 
alarm is passed on to the controlling centers of the 
body have not been accurately determined; but prob- 
ably it is through the nervous system that the counter- 
attack is planned. The essential point, however, is 
that volition on the part of the individual has nothing 
whatever to do with the extraordinary series of phe- 
nomena which follows. The blood-vessels in the imme- 
diate neighborhood of the affected part dilate, and the 
blood pours along them rapidly. It is this which causes 
a poisoned finger to throb. Then the blood-stream in 
the dilated vessel slows down, and from among the 
blood-corpuscles those known as the leucocytes, or 
white cells, begin to separate themselves and flow slowly 
along the inner wall of the blood-vessels at the margin 
of the blood-stream. If the germs break through the 
vessel-wall and find their way into the blood-stream, 
they are immediately attacked by the leucocytes, which 
surround them, endeavor to engorge them, and, having 
engorged them, destroy them by digesting them. 

If, however, the germs do not find their way into the 
blood-stream, but remain outside in the adjacent tis- 
sues, the leucocytes, not to be balked by their prey, will 



THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 65 

insinuate themselves through the blood-vessel wall and 
attack them where they lie. 

They put into practice the doctrine that attack is 
the surest method of defense. A leucocyte, on battle 
intent, will push out a little prolongation from its 
body, insert this between the cells that form the wall of 
the blood-vessel, and gradually work its way through 
without leaving any discoverable aperture, and pro- 
ceed to attack the germs in the open. Leucocyte after 
leucocyte will perform this feat, which is known as dia- 
pedesis, and hurry to the fray to wage a mighty battle 
with the enemy. If the leucocytes are overcome by 
the invading organisms a very serious illness, which 
may prove fatal to the patient whose body has become 
a battle-ground for enemy and defenders, may ensue. 
If the battle is localized and the invading enemy is de- 
feated, an abscess may result. If its contents are evac- 
uated by the knife of the surgeon, and examined with 
•a microscope, they will be found to consist of dead leu- 
cocytes containing in their substance the organisms 
they had succeeded in killing before they were them- 
selves overpowered; micro-organisms living and dead, 
and broken-down tissue cells, the debris of houses and 
homes, shattered as in the brave land of France by the 
intensity of the conflict that has been waged in their 
midst. 

This account is no fairy tale of science, but solid 
fact which has been verified over and over again. 

Cast into a more picturesque narrative, which will 
easily be remembered, we may present the above facts 
in this way. Just as every country with a large mer- 
chant fleet requires to maintain a navy for its protec- 
tion, the body, which has many cargo-boats (the red 
blood-corpuscles), has also a battle-fleet — the white 
blood-corpuscles, or leucocytes. Of these there are no 



66 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

less than 7,500 in every cubic millimeter of blood. 
When war breaks out the navy is mobilized, and there is 
a concentration of vessels of war at the place where they 
may best deal with the enemy. They endeavor 
to blockade him; and, if he will not come out 
into the open sea — the channels of the circu- 
lation — they will attack him, if possible, in his 
lairs; just as our navy has sought to destroy by bom- 
barding or by bombing from naval hydroplanes the 
haunts of the submarine along the Belgian coast. 
During a war there is, of necessity, great activity in all 
our naval yards in order that the fleet may be in- 
creased. Old cruisers are taken out of the yards and 
sent to sea again, and the building of new ones is 
speeded up. In the same way there is an enormous 
increase in the number of white corpuscles met with in 
the circulating blood. Leucocytes that had been rest- 
ing are poured into the circulation, and new ones are 
produced in the blood-forming glands and hurried into 
the circulation to take part in the conflict. The call 
for help may come from the remotest part of the Em- 
pire: from the Falkland Islands (or from the tip of a 
poisoned finger) : but wherever it comes from, the Mav}', 
or the leucocytes, are ever ready to seek the enemy out 
and give him battle wherever he may be found. 

The activity of the leucocytes and their capacity for 
waging war successfully upon the invading enemy vary 
in different individuals, and in the same individual at 
different times. This is one of the reasons why a poi- 
soned wound in one person may have much more serious 
consequences than in another. 

Not every fleet that sails the seas is ready at any 
moment to give battle to the foe ; but the country whose 
navy is always prepared, or the individual whose white 
blood-corpuscles are always in fighting trim is little 



THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 67 

likely to succumb to a sudden attack of the enemy. A 
navy that is kept in fighting condition by frequent man- 
euvers and by constant gun-practice is likely to give 
a better account of itself when the hour comes than 
one which never has the opportunity of testing its own 
capacity. It has been ascertained by experiment that 
the phagocytic properties of the leucocytes may be 
greatly increased by artificial means. Sir Almroth 
Wright has made many valuable deductions from this 
observation, and vaccine therapy, of which he is the fos- 
ter-father, is a practical application springing from it. 
If a quantity of dead micro-organisms of any kind be 
injected under the skin of a patient it is found that, in 
a few days, his leucocytes have developed the power of 
engorging, on an average, more micro-organisms of that 
particular variety than they had before. Their pha- 
gocytic power has been increased, not toward all or- 
ganisms, but for germs of that special kind. If, 
therefore, a vaccine be made from the bacteria found in 
a boil and injected into a patient suffering from that 
painful affection it is found that not only do the 
phagocytes seize on and devour the dead organisms 
in the vaccine, but, like Oliver Twist, they ask for 
more, and attack with avidity the germs responsible for 
the patient's condition. 

Vaccine therapy is still in its early youth ; but it has 
secured undying laurels in the present war, for, largely 
owing to its application, the incidence of typhoid fever, 
which in all previous campaigns was a pestilence to be 
dreaded, has been reduced almost to the vanishing point. 

But the body has other protective mechanisms be- 
sides phagocytosis, which are called into play when the 
need arises. It is a well-established fact that some 
animals and individuals are much less susceptible to 
certain diseases than others. It is also well-known 



68 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 






that an attack of a disease such as small-pox or scar- 
let fever will protect a person against another attack 
for a considerable number of years or for a life-time. 

Once it was believed that an infectious disease used 
up some pabulum or food which it found in the patient's 
system; and, as it was supposed to destroy this pab- 
ulum, there was none left for a second attack of the 
disease to feed on. But now it is recognized that this 
idea was erroneous, and that, whatever substances a 
disease may destroy in our blood, it enriches the blood 
by causing the prophylactic mechanisms of the body to 
elaborate protective agents. 

When a micro-organism invades the human body, 
pari passu with the production of poisons or toxins 
whose effect may be lethal, there are produced sub- 
stances that are inimical to the growth of the germ. 
A well-known parallel to this is met with in the case 
of the yeast fungus. If this organism is grown in a 
solution of sugar it vegetates luxuriantly, and converts 
part of the sugar into alcohol. This is a poison for 
young cell-life, and when the alcohol reaches a certain 
degree of concentration the yeast fungus is destroyed 
by it. 

If a person become infected with pneumonia we have 
a striking example of how the protective mechanism in 
the body operates. Pneumonia is an acute inflamma- 
tion of the lungs, and it is now known to be due to 
a micro-organism. The germ invades the lungs, and be- 
gins to multiply there. The earliest symptom of which 
the patient is conscious is usually a sensation of chilli- 
ness, followed by violent shivering. This is the first 
manifestation of the protective mechanism in action. 
The sensation of chilliness is due to a contraction of the 
blood-vessels in the skin whereby as much blood as 
possible, and therefore all the available leucocytes, may 



THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 69 

be hurried to the invaded part. The violent shivering, 
which is due to rapid and repeated contractions of 
muscle fibers throughout the body, is involuntary, but 
purposeful and protective, for active muscular exer- 
cise is the speediest means of increasing bodily heat. 
A temperature of 102° F., and over, is inimical to the 
growth of micro-organisms, and the patient's temper- 
ature is rapidly elevated above that degree as the first 
step in the protective scheme. As the organisms grow 
they produce poisons or toxins which are thrown into 
the circulation, and which may have a deleterious effect 
on the muscle-fibers of the heart, and the nerve-ganglia 
which control its action. The heart already has a 
sufficient mechanical strain thrown upon it, as it re- 
quires extra power to maintain the circulation in a lung 
which is rapidly undergoing consolidation. But the 
protective functions of the body are at work, and are 
rapidly producing substances which are antagonistic 
to the toxins, and to the micro-organisms which are the 
cause of the disease. These substances are known as 
anti-toxins, and they unite chemically with the poison- 
ous products of the organismal growth, and render them 
inert to the living tissues. What part of the anti- 
toxin is not required to neutralize the toxin remains 
over to exert its effect on the germs — an effect pre- 
judicial to their further development, and therefore 
beneficial for the patient. The occurrence of what is 
known as the " crisis " in pneumonia, when the tempera- 
ture rapidly falls, the rapidity of the heart-beats and 
the respiratory rate come down to something like nor- 
mal, and the patient in the course of a few hours un- 
dergoes a marked change for the better, indicates the 
point at which the amount of anti-toxin elaborated in 
the body exceeds the amount of toxin, and so can neu- 
tralize it. 



70 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

In pneumonia we are therefore the witnesses of a 
race between the production of toxin and anti-toxin; 
and if the heart can hold out while the contest is at its 
hottest, a point will be reached when the anti-toxin will 
overpass the toxin, and the patient will recover. 
Observations of this kind and practical deductions 
made from them have opened up an immense field for 
curative endeavor. 

It has long been known that the animal economy 
could accustom itself to small repeated doses of certain 
poisons, until a stage of tolerance is reached at which 
an enormous amount of these poisons may be admin- 
istered without much effect. Every smoker has more 
or less poignant memories of his first pipe. Tobacco 
is a poison, and for the neophyte a first small indul- 
gence often produces uncomfortable results. But, if 
he try again, his system gradually becomes accustomed 
to the poison, so that a smoker of some years' expe- 
rience can consume in the space of a few hours an 
amount of tobacco which might kill a boy were he to in- 
dulge in the same quantity on the day of his first sur- 
reptitious pipe. A like truth holds good with regard 
to alcohol, and De Quincey affords a classical example 
of the tolerance which the human system may de- 
velop towards opium. Abrin and ricin are two 
highly poisonous vegetable substances ; but Ehrlich 
found that by small successive doses of these substances 
a condition of tolerance towards them could be estab- 
lished among animals. Armed with this knowledge, he 
carried his experiments a step further. He fed mice 
on abrin and ricin, and, when they had developed a high 
degree of resistance to the poisons so that they were 
able to consume without prejudicial effects a much 
larger dose than that which, originally, would have 
killed them, he drew blood from them and injected the 



THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 71 

fluid part of the blood into other mice. At the same 
time he administered to this second group of mice large 
doses of the vegetable poisons, and he made the im- 
portant discovery that a mouse treated with serum 
from an animal highly immunized against abrin and 
ricin by progressive feeding was able to consume no 
less than forty times as much of the original poison 
without disaster as it could do before it was treated 
in this wa}'. 

The practical applications of this experiment have 
been far-reaching, and the ultimate goal is not yet in 
sight. One of the most fruitful developments issuing 
from this observation was the preparation of diph- 
theria anti-toxin. Roux and Yersin made a careful 
study of the toxins of diphtheria, and their work, sup- 
plemented by that of Behring, resulted in the discov- 
ery of a new and highly successful treatment for that 
dread disease. 

If small and repeated doses of diphtheria toxin, pro- 
cured from the cultivation of the bacillus dipththerice in 
a suitable broth, are injected into a horse it is found 
that the horse is not rendered ill thereby, but there is 
gradually produced in its blood an enormous quantity 
of a substance that can not only kill the diphtheria 
germ, but also neutralize the diphtheria toxin. This 
is diphtheritic anti-toxin; and the modern treatment 
of diphtheria consists in injecting under the skin of 
the affected person, as soon as the diagnosis is made, 
a large quantity of serum drawn from a horse which 
has been rendered immune, in the manner described, 
towards the bacilli and toxins of diphtheria. In a 
case of diphtheria which recovers without the adminis- 
tration of anti-toxin the patient has had to rely on the 
efforts of his own protective mechanism for the elabora- 
tion of this substance, and there has been a heated 



72 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

race between the production of toxin and anti-toxin. 
To administer anti-toxin in the earliest stages of the 
disease is to confer upon the patient a very great ad- 
vantage, for he thus enters the race with an enormous 
quantity of ready prepared, highly potent anti-serum 
with which to neutralize the poison that the germ will 
produce as it grows in his throat. Thanks to Behring 
and Roux, the word " diphtheria," which at one time 
was pregnant of ill omen and bore a particularly 
sinister meaning for all parents of young children and 
for all physicians who devoted themselves specially to 
work among children, has lost much of its dread sig- 
nificance. 

All modern treatment founded on the administration 
of vaccines, anti-toxins and anti-sera has been built up 
from the recognition of the protective mechanism ex- 
isting latent in the body. There is little doubt that all 
dwellers in cities are daily being immunized against va- 
rious diseases by the continual ingestion or inhalation 
of disease germs. Where the initial dose is too large, 
or the resistance of the individual too low, a serious 
illness with, possibly, a fatal issue may result. 

Civilization and acquired tolerance of the germs of 
disease proceed hand in hand. On a virgin soil, such 
as the New Hebrides, an epidemic of measles may rage 
like a plague and destroy a large portion of the pop- 
ulation. We and our children are daily breathing or 
swallowing morbid germs in small quantities, and these 
stimulate our protective mechanism so that one day 
when we engorge a larger quantity of germs than usual 
our immunized constitutions are able to repel the as- 
sault. 

Those who find in physics and chemistry an expla- 
nation of all the phenomena of life are ready to explain 
all these facts in terms of their two pet sciences, and 



THE PROTECTION OF LIFE 73 

they have invented a terminology to designate every 
stage and event in the phenomena of protection. They 
are satisfied with secondary causes ; they regard any 
first cause as unknowable. However that may be, 
there is surely ground for the belief that such beau- 
tiful and coordinated devices as we have indicated, 
coming into play for the protection of life must have 
had their origin in no haphazard chance, but in a great 
and intelligent Mind. 



CHAPTER VI 

HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 

" La petite cellule initiale d'ou derive chaque etre vivant et qui, 
developpee dans un sens determine, deviendra oiseau, homme ou 
chene, contient un long passe et un immense avenir. Ce minuscule 
element charge d'un entassement de siecles revele un monde de 
forces, oriente par un mecanisme dont la comprehension reste tres 
au-dessus de notre intelligence." 

Dr. Gustave le Bocsr. Hier et Demain. 

We have seen how the life of the individual is pro- 
tected by delicate and complex mechanisms of de- 
fense. The power of reproduction, which is given 
to the individual, and the principles which underlie 
heredity, are the chief agents for protecting the life 
of the species. 

That like begets like is a fact of common knowledge, 
but why it should be so is an unfathomable mystery. 
Among the bacteria and the protozoa, where multipli- 
cation takes place by a simple process of division, there 
is nothing strange or puzzling. But in the higher 
realms of nature, where reproduction is complicated by 
the antecedent necessity of a union between the male 
and female primordial elements, the problem widens 
and becomes more and more obscure. 

If we take the fertilized eggs of a fly, a frog, and 
a fish we may be able to distinguish between them by 
their shape and size ; but, so far as test-tube and micro- 
scope can tell us, the protoplasm of which they con- 
sist is identical. And yet, even if they are allowed to 
develop in the same pond under conditions that, as far as 
possible, are identical, they will ultimately become fly, 

74 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 75 

frog, and fish, separated from each other by the whole 
diameter of genus. Nor is this all. Like begets like 
with extraordinary faithfulness. A child resembles 
closely one of its parents, or both. In build and gen- 
eral appearance, shape of features and limbs, color of 
eyes and hair, texture of skin, disposition, and other 
mental qualities every child is a pocket-edition of its 
parents. Rut it is more than that. It exhibits quali- 
ties or features that have come to it from ancestors 
more remote, so that Emerson was justified in saying: 
" Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors." 

With quaint fancy Robert Louis Stevenson 1 enlarged 
on this idea when he wrote : " Our conscious years are 
but a moment in the history of the elements that build 
us. . . . And though to-day I am only a man of let- 
ters, either tradition errs or I was present when there 
landed at St. Andrews a French barber-surgeon to 
tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal 
Beaton ; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land 
and shouted the slogan of the Elliots ; I was present 
when a skipper, plying from Dundee, smuggled Jaco- 
bites to France after the '15. . . . Yes, parts of me 
have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met 
them well. And, away in the still cloudier past, the 
threads that make me up can be traced by fancy into 
the bosoms of thousands and millions of ascendants : 
Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old 
(and highly preferable) system of descent by females, 
fliers from before the legions of Agricola, marchers 
in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldean pla- 
teaus." 

It is not my intention to encumber these pages with 
the fascinating details of embryological development 
which have been studied so carefully, and mapped out 

i Memories and Portraits : The Manse, 



76 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

with such minuteness that they are now as plain as a 
mariner's chart. But, though this gigantic work has 
been accomplished with infinite labor, we are still entan- 
gled in mystery, for we cannot discover whence it comes 
that in the infinitely small speck of protoplasm which 
is the arena of all these changes such potentialities of 
growth and change, such undeviating loyalty to the tra- 
ditions of the species are already inherent. 

Long ago, before anything was known of the me- 
chanical changes attending embryological development 

— for we had to wait for the microscope to reveal them 

— various shrewd guesses were made to explain the mys- 
teries of heredity. But none of them appeared to sat- 
isfy the facts so adequately as the theory of pangenesis 
enunciated by Charles Darwin. According to Darwin, 
every part of the body and every organ in the body of an 
individual gives off tiny buds, or " pangenes," which are 
conveyed by the blood to the organs of reproduction. 
Each germinal cell, both of the male and female, in 
this way becomes possessed of a complete set of these 
buds, representing not only every organ, but every 
cell in every organ, every cell in every bone, and every 
cell in the skin, and all its appendages, such as the hair 
and nails. In the process of development, on this the- 
ory, there is simply a progressive unfolding and growth 
of all these pangenes enclosed in the male and female 
primordial germs, and, consequently, the offspring re- 
sembles its parents. 

This theory was a brilliant one, but it lacked prob- 
ability, and the practical difficulties associated with it 
seemed insuperable. For instance, a cod-fish can lay 
some 9,000,000 eggs in a season, and if every cell in the 
fish's body were to be represented by a pangene in each 
of the 9,000,000 eggs, the whole bodily activity of 
the fish would be occupied in the budding off and trans- 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 77 

port through the blood of this incalculable number of 
pangenes. Darwin himself, one of the clearest think- 
ers of his own or any other age, saw the difficulties that 
beset his theory, to which he had been driven in his 
endeavor to account for the transmission of acquired 
characters, such as modifications in bodily structure 
produced by disease, by mutilations, accidental or due 
to operative interference, or through the use or disuse 
of special organs. In Darwin's time a belief in the 
transmission of such acquired characters was gener- 
ally accepted, but now it is only adhered to by a small 
number of biologists. 

The theory of heredity which receives the greatest 
support to-day is that put forward by Weismann. It 
is a theory that may be said to be pragmatic ; it serves, 
and enables us to understand, in a reasonable way, 
some of the facts of heredity. The essential principle 
of the theory has been expressed as " the continuity of 
the germ-plasm." By this is meant that a certain part 
of the germ-plasm, or primordial protoplasmic material 
contained in the parent egg, is not used up in the struc- 
tural elaboration of the body of the new embryo, but 
is set aside, and kept for the formation of the germ- 
cells of the new generation. In confirmation of the 
soundness of this theory it may be mentioned that, in 
several cases, the setting apart of the germ-plasm has 
been observed with the microscope at the commence- 
ment of the development of a new embryo. Thus the 
germ-cells are said to pass on in the direct line from 
generation to generation, while in each generation the 
cells which go to form the body and the organs it con- 
tains are simply off-shoots from the germ-cells. The 
body is a kind of protecting covering thrown out to en- 
sure protection for, and to acquire the nourishment 
needed by, the germ-plasm. On a theory such as this 



78 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

we begin to understand how it is that like begets like, 
and why children resemble their parents or immediate 
ancestors more than they resemble the children of other 
people. It gives us a groundwork of understanding 
whereby we may comprehend why A.'s children resem- 
ble A. rather than B. For the germ-plasm from which 
they have originated has passed down to A. through 
many generations, and is continued in his children for 
transmission to the next. It 'is the old poetical idea 
of the torch of life — lampada vitae — translated into 
a physiological fact. This theory of the continuity of 
the germ-plasm enables us, further, to understand why 
it is that acquired characters — that is, characters 
that have been assumed during the life-time of the indi- 
vidual — are not handed on. An " acquired charac- 
ter," as that phrase is or ought to be understood, 
means a change in the body of the individual or organ- 
ism under consideration, and not, except secondarily, 
in its germ-plasm. As the germ-plasm remains un- 
changed throughout any modification in bodily struc- 
ture acquired during the life of the individual, the mod- 
ification is not transmitted. 

At various times and from various sources instances 
have been derived which would appear to suggest that 
acquired characters are transmitted. But we must 
guard against accepting a principle from an isolated 
handful of instances. There is, certainly, ground for 
the presumption that acquired characters may be 
passed on: but, on the other hand, exact experiments 
carried out with a view to ascertain the truth have 
yielded at most results that were inconclusive. There 
is the fundamental difficulty of conceiving any mechan- 
ism by which such variations could be transmitted; 
but that difficulty is no greater than others which con- 
front us in any attempt to study the mysteries of life, 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 79 

and, to be fair, we are not entitled to rule out the pos- 
sibility because our knowledge, as yet very imperfect, 
has not given us a clew as to how this might be possible. 
There may be a process or mechanism that we know 
nothing of. The biologists are divided in their opin- 
ions on the matter. At present the verdict is, " Not 
proven." It would be in the highest degree unscien- 
tific to say dogmatically that such hereditary trans- 
mission is impossible and never occurs. Many of us 
may live to see the results of a great natural exper- 
iment which is at present in operation. At the present 
moment a large proportion of our young men are suf- 
fering from " acquired " characters — the result of 
wounds. Many of them have lost a limb. These mu- 
tilations will not prevent them from marrying and be- 
coming the fathers of children. It is, however, in the 
highest degree unlikely that any of their children will 
be born structurally defective — lacking an arm, or 
a foot, an eye or an ear, because their father had lost 
one or other of these parts in battle. Life is too 
jealous of her own perfection to suffer that. 

The most recent contribution of value to the study 
of heredity is that made by Mendel. A little more 
than half a century ago Gregor Mendel, a Silesian 
monk, was quietly carrying out observations and ex- 
periments on the crossing of common peas. He class- 
ified his results with care, and made certain important 
deductions from them; but, strange to say, when he 
published a paper detailing his experiments and em- 
bodying his conclusions, it received no public scientific 
welcome, but was allowed to lie buried in the archives 
of the society to which he had communicated it, for 
thirty-five years. It was not until the law which Men- 
del had discovered by his patient researches was re- 
discovered in 1900 by three separate botanical inves- 



80 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

tigators that the neglected paper of the forgotten 
monk was dug out of its grave, and his title to the 
name of a great scientific investigator established. 
Correns, Tschermak, and De Vries were the first to con- 
firm Mendel's law; and his observations and conclu- 
sions have been substantiated and received further dem- 
onstration from the work of Punnet, Bateson, and 
Drinkwater. 

It is outside the scope of this chapter to describe 
in detail the experiments upon which the doctrines of 
Mendelism are founded. Those who are interested may 
pursue the study further in one or other of the 
monographs which are devoted to the subject. Men- 
del's great contribution to the science of heredity is 
that he proved that the transmission of certain factors 
from one generation to another is no haphazard occur- 
rence, but is definitely controlled by laws which may be 
reduced to mathematical formula?. He ascertained 
two great facts, and established two great principles. 
He showed that in the first hybrid generation there 
manifests itself, at the first crossing, a complete tri- 
umph of the characteristics of one parent, the char- 
acteristics of the second parent being suppressed. 
This he called " dominance." In the second generation 
he pointed out that what he called " segregation " oc- 
curs. By this he meant the appearance in definite pro- 
portions in the second generation of the characters 
which were combined in the cross. 

His experiments have been studied, verified, imitated, 
and extended, and the following are some of the con- 
clusions which have been gathered from the accum- 
ulated facts. It is now believed that in any living or- 
ganism there are certain qualities or characteristics 
that are capable of varying independently, and which 
may depend on some quality or factor in the germ- 






HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 81 

plasm, and are therefore transmissible. They can be 
separated out, identified, and followed through a series 
of breeding experiments. They are called " unit " 
characters, and the principles which govern their ap- 
pearance are known as " unit " factors. Complete he- 
redity from one parent to his offspring would mean 
the handing on of the sum-total of these " unit " factors. 
No character reveals itself in an individual unless the 
corresponding factor has been handed down to it. 
Factors may be handed on and remain undeveloped; 
but they may suddenly thrust themselves into prom- 
inence in a subsequent generation. This explains why 
a characteristic belonging to one or other of its grand- 
parents may appear in a child whose parents lack this 
quality. Mendelism is not difficult to understand when 
it is applied to the crossing of pea-plants. But its 
problems become infinitely more complex when the facts 
of human heredity are closely studied. Many disturb- 
ing factors come into play, so that, except for special 
features, such as the color of the eyes, the color of the 
hair, the shape of the hands, and other more or less 
minor details, Mendelism as applied to man has so far 
had only minor successes. Human heredity is a much 
too complex thing to be capable of reduction, as yet, 
to mathematical formulas. Heredity, with all that it 
connotes, still remains a profound mystery, and is, I 
believe, inexplicable unless we are prepared to admit 
some mysterious controlling and guiding principle 
which science has so far failed to recognize. 

Important as the heredity which has stamped its hall- 
mark upon an organism or an individual may be, there 
is another factor constantly at work in molding it, 
namely, its environment. The finished article, be it 
vegetable-marrow or man, is the resultant in a parallel- 
ogram of forces, the factors of which are heredity, or 



82 THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE 

what it brings with it into the world, and environ- 
ment, or the play of world forces upon it. So far as 
it concerns the individual, heredity stops at his birth, 
though the burden or the treasure it may have bound 
upon his shoulders is sometimes not revealed till after 
a long period of years. Its greatest influence is ante- 
natal. The environment of the parents may affect the 
heredity of the child for good or ill ; but the major part 
of the effect of environment is a post-natal and per- 
sonal matter. 

A leek or a lily grown in the open air has green 
leaves, but if the plant is forced to live in a dark 
cellar where the sunlight cannot reach it, its leaves are 
white. It requires the energic touch of the sun to en- 
able it to elaborate the green chlorophyll, which gives 
it its verdure. Or it may be grown in the sunlight, 
in soil from which all traces of iron have been re- 
moved, and its leaves will remain pale. But if a little 
iron be added to the soil the leaves will quickly assume 
their natural hue. Here we are dealing with only one 
factor in the environment; but in nature, as a rule, 
the circumstances are more complex. 

The response to the conditions of environment are 
well shown by the behavior of certain Alpine plants. 
If taken from their natural habitat and cultivated in 
the lowlands, they undergo material alterations in 
character. They grow to a greater height and their 
leaves expand in length and breadth. So long as the 
plant remains in the lowlands it will exhibit in each 
successive generation these altered characters. But if 
one of the plants is transferred once more to its original 
habitat, high up upon the bleak mountains, it will once 
more assume the Alpine characteristics, which con- 
tinue to persist so long as the plant or its descendants 
live under the same conditions. 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 83 

E. S. Goodrich x quotes an interesting example of the 
effect of environment. 

A French botanist, Bonnier, divided a common dan- 
delion plant and grew one half in the lowlands and the 
other at a considerable altitude among the mountains. 
The part grown in the lowlands developed into a tall 
and slender plant, while the part transferred to the 
heights underwent very considerable modifications. It 
developed longer roots, probably in order to derive 
adequate nourishment from the sparser soil; its stems 
were shorter and its leaves smaller, probably because 
its nourishment was deficient; its leaves were more 
abundantly supplied with hairs, and its flowers were 
larger and brighter. No doubt this latter modifica- 
tion was with a view to attract insects, to ensure its 
propagation. The seeds of the Alpine plant, trans- 
ferred to the lowlands, reproduced the lowland form. 
If planted in the mountains, the Alpine type was re- 
produced; and seeds of the lowland form cultivated 
among the heights developed into the Alpine type; 
while, if either form were transplanted bodily to the 
habitat of the other, it assumed the type common to 
its new surroundings. Goodrich concludes : " This 
change is accomplished by the new-growing tissues, for 
the already formed tissues are no longer capable of 
altering. Once fully differentiated they are ' fixed.' 
So we see that organisms are molded by their environ- 
ment; it is not the developed result which is trans- 
mitted, it is not the modification which is inherited, but 
the capacity for modifications in certain directions, the 
modifiability." 

In the nature of things it is perhaps to be expected 
that the influence of environment should make itself felt 

i Evolution, by E. S. Goodrich, M.A., F.R.S. 



84 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

in plant life; but it plays a great part in producing 
modifications of animal life as well. 

It has long been known that if a sea-water protozoon 
be transferred suddenly into fresh water it will quickly 
die, a victim to its unwonted environment. But if, in- 
stead of undergoing this brusque and fatal transfer- 
ence, it be placed successively in more and more dilute 
solutions of sea-water in which the concentration of 
salt is progressively diminished until pure fresh water 
is reached it will gradually acquire such powers of tol- 
erance towards its altered environment that it will con- 
tinue to live. 

Similarly, if we take a protozoon which is normally 
found in fresh water and suddenly place it in sea-water 
it will at once die; but it may, like the salt-water pro- 
tozoon, develop the power of living in an unaccustomed 
medium if, instead of a sudden transference from one 
extreme to another, we allow it time to accustom itself 
to new conditions by carrying it through a series of 
waters containing more and more salt until we reach 
sea-water. Physically the two protozoa may resemble 
each other so closely that it is impossible to tell from 
a mere inspection whether they belong to the sea-water 
class or the fresh-water class ; but the point may be 
settled at once by immersing them in sea-water, when 
the fresh-water protozoon will immediately die. 

Fish, insects, and Crustacea which have lived for gen- 
erations in the waters of a dark cave gradually lose 
their eyes, since vision is of no further use to them ; 
but the fins, tails, antennas, and limbs with which 
they are provided grow enormously in length, so that 
they may even exceed the length of the creature's body. 
These limbs, thus adapted by environment to meet the 
special requirements of the creatures to which they be- 
long, enable them to recognize obstacles, to feel for 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 85 

food, and to avoid collisions with each other or with 
the rocks and stones of their habitat. They are to 
those sightless creatures what his stick is to a blind 
man. 

Any one who has ever watched a mountain spring 
bubbling up from between the ribs of Mother Earth 
has before him, if he will allow his imagination to play 
upon it, a picture of the whole story of heredity and 
environment. The water gushes up, fresh, sparkling, 
and cold, and incorporate with it are some qualities 
it has gathered from the earth. What history lies be- 
hind it we cannot tell, but we know that, long before it 
was cloistered in the hidden reservoir from which it is 
now bursting, it fell from the clouds upon the flanks of 
the surrounding hills and percolated gently through 
into some dark and undiscovered recess between the 
buried rocks. Long before it fell from the clouds it 
had been lifted up from the smiling surface of the sea, 
by the energy of the sun. But whether in the sea, 
or in the clouds, or distilling as dew or rain upon the 
hillside, it was water all the while: for the germ- 
plasm is continuous. 

And now it is coming forth again into the brave 
light of heaven eager to run its appointed race. It 
tumbles down the hillside, water still, but as it goes 
it takes up and carries with it new qualities it has 
filched from its environment. Here it washes away 
some earth from an overhanging bank, and is made, 
for the moment, turbid; there it dissolves some salts 
from the rocks against which it frets as it moves on- 
wards, and yonder, where it sweeps into the valley it 
scoops large debris from a bank of clay. In the val- 
ley, its course is stayed for a little while, and it drops 
into the silent depths of its stagnant pools some of 
the earthy debris with which it has become burdened. 



86 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Then it flows gently on, past farm and croft, broaden- 
ing and deepening as it is fed by tributary streams, 
mirroring the overhanging trees, catching the shad- 
ows of every fleecy cloud, plowing its way by the 
easiest path, deflected here by a barrier of rock and 
there by a promontory of beaten earth that it cannot 
wash away. Or it enters a defile between buttresses 
of rock which narrow it down so that it races in a wild 
tumult between its precipitous banks. 

It is perpetually yet never the same; and one may 
stand beside it in one's childhood, and after the long 
lapse of years again in one's old age and say, " This 
is Avon, or Nith, or Thames." For a stream of run- 
ning water is indeed a true picture of personality — 
of continuity amid and in spite of perpetual change. 

The sun kisses it at noon-day, and lifts up from it 
an armful of vapor to repair some exhausted cloud; the 
frosts of winter touch it with iron hand, and it is fet- 
tered with ice; but, cloud or ice, it is the same water 
still, the impotent creature of environment. It flows 
on, past hamlet and through town, and its fair beauty 
is sullied by contact with human kind. It has lost 
its pristine beauty, but it is the same water still. And 
so, on it goes, through the sunlight and under the star- 
encrusted sky, till it pours into the cleansing bosom of 
ocean, where all the adventitious qualities it has 
gathered up from its environment are lost in the im- 
mensity of the sea. It was water when it burst from 
the hillside; it is water when it reaches the ocean; it 
has preserved its identity, though its identity has been 
influenced over and over again by its environment. 
Like the germ-plasm, it has held on in an unbroken 
and continuous line: and environment has been able to 
do no more than mold its character for a little while. 

Applied to human life the influences of heredity and 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 87 

environment have large and broad results. Primarily 
it is heredity which has most to do with the physical 
side of a child's life ; but, in so far as mind is rooted 
in brain, heredity plays a part in endowing the psy- 
chical side of life with certain tendencices or apti- 
tudes, by giving the child a brain of a certain texture, 
with nerve-cells sluggish or active, slow to respond, to 
stimuli, or alert and alive. The child of healthy, vigor- 
ous parents is much more likely to start life with a good 
physique than the child of delicate parents. If a child 
comes of a long line of healthy ancestors it is much 
more likely to be born a splendid specimen of infant 
life than if it had behind it nothing better than a fam- 
ily tree with withered and delicate branches and an un- 
sound stem. 

With very few exceptions, diseases are not trans- 
mitted directly, at birth, from parents to children. 
For instance, tubercular parents, who are proverbially 
fertile, very frequently have line children; but these 
children start life handicapped in so far as they in- 
herit, through the continuity of the germ-plasm, a tex- 
tural quality of the bodily organs which is frequently 
unable successfully to resist infection by the organisms 
of tuberculosis which we breathe daily. Tuberculosis 
may be actually transmitted from parent to child, but 
this is extremely rare. Bring the child of tubercular 
parents up in an unsuitable environment, expose it 
to the infection of tuberculosis by allowing it con- 
stantly to associate, at close quarters, in all the little 
intimacies of affectionate home-life, with its tubercular 
parent, and it is almost certain to contract the dis- 
ease. Here we have an example of the effect of en- 
vironment upon a child predisposed by heredity to a 
specific malady. But if, at a very early period of its 
life, that child were taken to the country, brought 



88 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

up in healthy surroundings, in a house where no tuber- 
cular person has previously lived, allowed to bathe in 
the glories of the sunshine, and to take largesse from 
the clean ocean of the country air, well fed, well 
clad, and well cared for, it is more than likely, indeed it 
is practically certain, that it would through its favor- 
able environment be able to overcome the inborn tend- 
ency with which it came into the world, and grow up 
to be a healthy man or woman, whose children would 
start the race of life without the initial handicap which 
weighed upon their parents. 

Any one who has studied with an observant and 
sympathetic eye the child-life in the slums of a 
great city must have been touched often to sorrow, 
and not infrequently to anger. Many children born 
in the slums are magnificent samples of human baby- 
hood. This is particularly the case in a city like 
Liverpool, where many of the unskilled laborers are 
young Irishmen who have been brought up in the 
country, but who, through the allurement of more 
work and better wages, have been attracted to the town. 
Some of them marry girls of their own class with a 
country heredity behind them, and the children born 
of such a union are infants of which any mother might 
be proud. But watch these children grow up in the 
body-warping, soul-destroying environment of the 
slums. Instead of the green fields where their father 
and mother scampered barefooted as children, they 
have the gutter for a playground; for the pure air 
of heaven which blew round the little thatched cot- 
tages where their parents were born, they have the 
exhausted, fetid, disease-laden atmosphere of a great 
city ; for the blue expanse of the open sky, they have a 
few adventurous but anaemic rays of the sun, which 
filter with difficulty into the narrow courts where they 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 89 

dwell; for the wholesome potatoes, porridge, and but- 
termilk of their parents' country, they have food of 
a dubious nutritive value packed in a tin in some 
trans-Atlantic slaughter-house; for the song of the 
birds, they have the unmelodious clatter of an Italian 
piano-organ ; and, for the benediction of the stars, the 
uncertain light of the street lamps. It is therefore 
little wonder that the splendid start with which they 
began life is rapidly stolen from them by their en- 
vironment, and that, from the time they are weaned, 
they begin to deteriorate. They become stunted, 
rickety, emaciated, and prematurely old. They are 
the victims of diseases of the eyes, the ears, the throat, 
the skin, the bones. They are adults before they have 
had any childhood, and old men and women when they 
ought to be in their prime. The tragedy of all great 
cities is the tragedy of the child-life of the slums, and 
I have often wondered if at an early age a large exper- 
iment in the transference of child-life were performed, 
and the children of the rich were transported to the 
slums and brought up in that environment, whether 
they would do half as well as the children they have 
displaced. Few things, if any, can be more soul- 
destroying and body -killing than life in the rookeries 
of slumdom, and I have sometimes wondered whether, 
if it had been my fate to be born and brought up in 
a slum, my soul would ever have risen above the level 
of a pot of beer. The marvel is that the children of 
the slums do so well as they succeed in doing. Not 
once, but many times, in the crucible of the war, where 
the souls of men have been tested, the boy from the 
slum has stood in the same line face to face with the 
same danger, and confronted with the same opportun- 
ity of sacrifice as the lad from the home of broad acres 
with the traditions of his class and school behind him. 



90 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

And the lad from the slums has shown himself as 
brave a man, and as generous a man, with instincts of 
altruism as fine as his more favored brother. He has 
had no advantages of birth; his environment has been 
of the worst ; but he has learned how to die like " a very 
gallant gentleman." For a man's soul is a big thing, 
and no circumstances can triumph over it. 

And when the drum-fire of the heavy guns is silenced 
and we return to the longed-for, happy days of peace, 
I imagine that the understanding come to in the face 
of death between the favored of fortune and their 
humble brothers will not readily be broken. To face 
danger together, to bleed together, and, if need be, to 
die together, breaks down the artificial barrier of 
class ; and the lad from the slums, compan}dng with 
him in the inferno, has learned to trust and honor the 
lad from the broad acres ; and the boy from the man- 
sion has learned to understand and respect the boy 
from the city court. In so far as they were artifi- 
cial, the war has smashed up class distinctions, and 
what Burns long ago tried to teach has to-day a wider 
acceptation : 

" The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man's the gowd, for a' that." 

Environment, though it may neutralize much of the 
good with which a child is endowed by heredity, may 
act in the other direction, and exert a beneficial effect 
upon a child which has started life handicapped by a 
bad ancestral taint. Good food and warm clothing, 
which are physical conditions of life, and wise edu- 
cation and careful discipline, which are mental con- 
ditions of life, may convert a poor, wretched child of 
the gutter into a respectable man or woman. Bar- 
nardo's Homes in England, Quarrier's Homes in Scot- 






HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 91 

land, and every industrial school and training-ship in 
the country, are standing witnesses to the saving grace 
of propitious environment. 

Environment in nature, with all that it connotes, is 
one of the regulating factors which helps to ensure 
the survival of the fittest. But in human life so much 
of our environment is artificial that it kills many who, 
by heredity, were well fitted to survive, and protects 
and shields others who, in virtue of their physical 
handicap at birth, would have little chance of surviving 
were they not specially nurtured and surrounded with 
all the comforts that wealth and devotion can procure. 
Nature is ever seeking to improve life, but sometimes 
man steps in and interferes to protect the weakling 
which would otherwise succumb. But in the long run 
Nature wins the day, for ultimately a weakly family 
dies out : or the weakness, if it be due to a transmissible 
disease such as syphilis, ceases to be operative after 
a generation or two. Though people of unsound mind 
may beget children, they are often sterile; and if they 
do become parents the family either tends to become 
extinct or the mental weakness to be eradicated. 

Fortunately, also, the chronic alcoholic is often 
childless, for Nature is jealous of the purity of her 
stock. 

Where the laws of Nature are allowed to operate 
freely the results tend to maintain a satisfactory equi- 
librium. But man can and does upset the balance oc- 
casionally. 

Science, with groping finger and inquiring eye, has 
discovered for us some of the secrets that lie behind 
heredity and the influence of environment; but we have 
been very slow to apply them. Most often the appli- 
cation of a principle precedes the discovery of the 
scientific facts upon which it depends. The richness 



92 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of Tyrian purple was admired and used before the sci- 
ence of chemistry had cracked its shell, and men made 
melody before there was any science of acoustics or 
laws of harmony; but in this great sphere where the 
application of principles, established by science, might 
have done so much, practically nothing has been at- 
tempted except in so far as animals are concerned. 
The breed of horses, of dogs, of cows, and of sheep 
has been improved for the sake of paltry prizes on the 
race-course, or at the cattle-show, or for the enrich- 
ment of a few enlightened agriculturists ; but, so far as 
the human race is concerned, practically nothing has 
been done on any large scale either to improve the 
breed or to protect it from the deleterious effects of a 
bad environment. To think of the matter seriously is 
to be staggered by our own ineptitude. Man, who 
has discovered whatever is known about heredity and 
environment, is the last to profit by his knowledge. 

If we are to recover in a reasonable time from the 
desolating havoc which the carnage of war has brought 
among the flower of our manhood we must set about ap- 
plying our knowledge at once. Any effective scheme 
will entail a vast expenditure, but a country that can 
pour out close on £7,000,000 a day for the protection 
of its frontiers, and, incidentally, for the destruction 
of the lives of its enemies, should be able and willing to 
spend lavishly of its substance in protecting and saving 
the lives of its own people. The expenditure of a sum 
equal to our share of the cost of the war for one month 
would be sufficient, I imagine, to tear down and rebuild, 
as wholesome dwelling-places, practically all the slums 
in the country. And if this estimate is too low — 
for I am only a physician and no financial expert — 
surely the result could be obtained by devoting to this 
end a sum equal to one week's war expenditure every 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 93 

year for ten or twenty years. Hitherto we have reared 
an Imperial race in slums; but it is our bounden 
duty to see that we make the Britain our men have 
bled and died for a country worthy of their great sac- 
rifice, where life can be lived under wholesome and 
healthy conditions. To abolish the slums would be to 
lessen enormously the incidence of disease. Many in- 
fectious diseases find hot-beds for their propagation 
in the slums, and the mischief spreads from the rook- 
eries where it has developed to the better-class dwelling- 
houses : for thus are we punished for the neglect of 
our poorer brethren within our gates. Better housing 
conditions, more space, more light, more air, would 
speedily reduce infantile mortality. And if, side by 
side with a sane policy of housing reform, we had tem- 
perance reform as well, and such economic reforms 
as would abolish sweating — that inhuman system 
whereby the vampire middleman grows fat on the blood 
and tears of women and little children — we should 
have done much to improve the environment of the 
young life of our country, and given it a chance to 
grow and develop as God meant it to do. And, side by 
side with these reforms, we require educational reform. 
More attention should be paid in schools to instruction 
in the elements of hygiene, and all senior girls should 
receive lessons in mother-craft. No scientist would 
hand over to an uninstructed girl a delicate piece of 
scientific apparatus, and expect her, by some natural 
gift of intuition, to know how to handle it, control it, 
and use it. But, by habit, that is what we are daily 
allowing to occur. Girls of all classes marry without 
the haziest ideas as to child-nurture and child-welfare. 
It is therefore little to be wondered at that the propor- 
tion of babies which die in the first year of life is 
enormously high, especially in our great cities. A 



94 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

considerable number of these unfortunate infants are 
first babies. They die that through their unavailing 
tears their inexperienced mothers may acquire some 
slight knowledge of how to rear children. They are 
vicarious sufferers, sacrificed that the conditions of 
life may be more tolerable and less lethal for the 
brothers and sisters who may follow them. But what 
a wastage! In these late days, and in spite of our 
civilization we out-Herod Herod. 

Surely there is a better way of teaching mother- 
craft than in such a stern and spendthrift school, and, 
in an age when such stress is laid upon the rights of 
the community, let us not forget that the individual has 
rights, even though it is only a slum-baby who has " no 
language but a cry." Every child born into the 
world, legitimate or illegitimate, has the right to live. 
The law recognizes -this by laying punitive hands upon 
any one who by violence robs the youngest infant of 
life. But a thousand times more children are done to 
death through ignorance than by homicidal violence, 
and the law, or the law-makers, stand by and do noth- 
ing- 

In paying due deference to the rights of the indi- 
vidual we are sometimes in danger of forgetting the 
rights of the race, which are infinitely greater. Hith- 
erto human mating has been too much a haphazard 
matter. Love is not always wise. But a time is com- 
ing when no man or woman will be permitted to marry 
unless they can produce a certificate of health. The 
requirements need not be pitched too high; but they 
should consist of at least moderately good physique, 
soundness of mind, and freedom from any disease ca- 
pable of being transmitted to the children, or, as in the 
case of tuberculosis, likely to hand on a specially sus- 
ceptible constitution. It will be a good day for Eng- 



HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT 95 

land when every father asks the suitor for his daugh- 
ter's hand not what his bank balance is, but whether 
his blood is clean: for more women have been ruined 
in health and more children doomed to a heritage of 
suffering through the neglect of this pertinent but not 
impertinent question than Nero ever butchered or 
Herod's soldiers slew. Of old it was said, " The fathers 
have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children 
are set on edge," and the proverb still holds true. 

With the advance of education and the dissemination 
of some knowledge of the laws of heredity public opin- 
ion is gradually becoming leavened by more sensible 
views about marriage; and in due time the possession 
of a certificate of health by both parties to the con- 
tract will be as necessary a preliminary as the procla- 
mation of banns. 

Though we have learned much about heredity, there 
are still many things about it that are obscured by 
impenetrable darkness, and its mysteries are so great 
that, were there no God, we should almost require to 
postulate one to explain them. 



CHAPTER VII 

man's freedom, and man's soul 

"Man's Free-will is but a bird in a cage; he can stop at the 
lower perch, or he can mount to a higher. Then that which is 
and knows will enlarge his cage, give him a higher and a higher 
perch, and at last break off the top of his cage, and let him out 
to be one with the Free-will of the Universe." 

Tennysok. Life of Lord Tennyson, vol. i, p. 318. 

" The thrall in person may be free in soul." 

Tennysok. Gareth and Lynette. 

The one fact of which we are certain is our own ex- 
istence. We believe that other things exist besides our- 
selves. We see the sun, the moon, the stars ; we are 
stirred to delight by the beautiful panorama of nature ; 
we are jostled in the streets by other creatures like our- 
selves ; but we can never feel perfectly assured that 
these things have a real existence of their own, inde- 
pendent of our consciousness of them. We know them 
only through the impressions they make upon our 
senses. But we are conscious of our own iden- 
tity; we recognize that this identity is independ- 
ent of time and change; we can control the move- 
ments of our limbs ; we are free to choose one course 
and reject another; we can think in abstract terms, 
reason within ourselves, regulate our conduct accord- 
ing to the experience of the past, and formulate deci- 
sions upon moral issues. 

There is an almost insuperable temptation to regard 
the body as nothing more than a great and delicately 
adjusted machine in which is at work a vast and com- 

96 



MAN'S FREEDOM, AND MAN'S SOUL 97 

plicated system of wheels and springs, pumps and 
levers, pipes and valves, and wherein, as in a chemist's 
test-tube, marvelous chemical unions and dissolutions 
are perpetually taking place. Many of the processes 
of life may be expressed in mechanical and chemical 
terms ; but, much as we may marvel at the wonders 
and potentialities of modern chemistry, we must pause 
before we can accept the idea that thought, volition, 
consciousness, are nothing more than the product of 
chemical changes. We cannot reduce to atomic equa- 
tions and express in chemical formulas the will to be 
ready to lay our lives down for a just cause; or all the 
n^sterious beauty of maternal love. Nor can we rea- 
sonably imagine that the choice between moral right 
and moral wrong is to be determined by the combina- 
tion of chemical molecules, or that hope is a nascent 
chemical product, and despair a chemical experiment 
gone wrong. Test-tubes and reagents do not supply 
us with an adequate explanation of the mental life of 
the individual: and, although one dare not affirm, since 
the opposite has been proved, that thought, emotion, 
and action are not attended by chemical changes in the 
brain-cells, we must guard against the danger of 
failing to discriminate between a phenomenon and its 
concomitants. The noise of a peal of thunder is a 
concomitant and consequence of the electric discharge 
that gives us the lightning; but the noise does not 
give birth to the thunder-bolt, nor has it any of its 
lethal powers. 

Primitive man, pondering on the mystery of his 
shadow, startled to see his reflection look back at 
him with frightened eyes when he stooped to drink 
from some quiet pool, and amazed when an echoing 
rock flung his voice back out of the distance, early 
concluded that he had a double. This double was his 



98 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

spirit or his soul. It was immaterial. It left his body 
at death, casting it aside like some worn-out garment. 
Without this soul he was a corpse; with it he was a 
sentient being. 

The earliest philosophers believed that the soul was 
responsible for our mental life; that it gave us our 
thoughts, and, as thought was the loftiest activity of 
which the human being was capable, they imagined that 
the soul must be something of divine origin, some form 
of celestial fire sent down from heaven and incorporate 
in man — some breath or essence of the gods. Among 
the pagan philosophers Plato conceived of the soul 
as a charioteer, free, and capable of free movement, 
what time he directed and controlled the chariot of the 
body. 

Some believe that the soul that is in man, or rather 
that, is man, is a part of God himself, a fragment of 
the Godhead, imprisoned in our earthly clay, limited 
by its separation from the Divine Being, and shackled 
to earth by its material habitation. Others, who have 
only a hazy idea of God as a Person, regard the soul 
as a part of " the all," substituting a mere name of 
indefinite connotation for a principle that they are un- 
able further to envisage. 

Man shares many qualities in common with inani- 
mate matter. He shares other qualities with the whole 
animal creation, but he alone, among the things of the 
earth, has the power of exercising free-will. He can 
choose between two lines of action; he can decide ab- 
stract problems ; he can " eschew evil and do good." 
If he were matter, and matter only, such things would 
be an impossibility. Some physiologists deny that 
man has any free-will. They try to convince themselves 
that all his actions are automatic ; that the central 
nervous system, the organ through which the mind ex- 



MAN'S FREEDOM, AND MAN'S SOUL 99 

presses itself, is little more than a power-house in which 
afferent impulses, or impulses coming from without 
through the gateways of the senses and along the con- 
ducting paths of the sensory nerves, are converted 
into efferent impulses which are transmitted through 
the outgoing nerves of motion and result in action. 
They do not allow that the individual will comes into 
operation at all. The efferent impulse which follows 
the sensory stimulus is conditioned by heredity, by ed- 
ucation, by religious bias, by a thousand and one cir- 
cumstances that may previously have acted upon a 
man or his ancestors, and made certain nerve-paths or 
certain nexuses between afferent and efferent impulses 
more easily bridged. So that, if I decide that I shall 
have tea for breakfast instead of coffee, I am not ex- 
erting an}' free-will, but my olfactory or gustatory end- 
organs, for some reason known only to the physiologist, 
are sending memory-pictures of the flavor of tea up to 
my central nervous system, and through the nerves that 
control the muscles of speech, without the exercise of 
any choice on my part, tea is being ordered. The 
brain becomes, therefore, little more than a telephone 
exchange, where the operator is asked through an in- 
coming wire (an afferent nerve) to connect the speaker 
up with another number (an efferent nerve) and does 
so without exercising any discrimination on her own 
part. To express the problem in such simple terms 
is to reduce it to an absurdity. 

What actually happens in the human mind when 
free-will comes into play is fairly well represented by 
the following illustration. 

When a great battle is raging the general in com- 
mand is at his headquarters behind the lines anxiously 
awaiting reports of how the fight is going. With his 
staff he has probably devoted days and weeks, possibly 



100 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

months, of anxious and particular thought to the plan- 
ning of his operations. At such and such an hour 
it has been decided that the artillery bombardment shall 
begin ; at such a moment it shall enter upon a wild but 
ordered crescendo ; and at a predetermined hour it 
shall reach its zenith, and then cease suddenly, and, at 
that moment, the officers in the trenches have been or- 
dered to launch themselves and their men over the top. 
Instructions have been given down to the minutest de- 
tail. The goal aimed at has been defined. Certain 
regiments have been held in reserve, ready to lend help 
wherever needed. By runner, by despatch-rider, by 
carrier-pigeon, by telephone and telegram the general 
and his staff are kept fully informed as to how the day 
is faring, and as each report comes in a little colored 
flag is moved upon the map of the battle-field, so that, 
moment by moment, the commanding officer has before 
him a bird's-eye view of the situation. Suddenly a mes- 
sage comes that at a certain part of the line there has 
been an unusual resistance, the nature of which is 
tersely described. Such contingencies have not been 
unforeseen, and have already been provided for in the 
detailed plans which the general and his staff had pre- 
pared. It had, let us say, been already determined in 
consultation that if the advance were held up at this 
particular point, the artillery should be commanded to 
concentrate upon it. If the general were an automa- 
ton, hide-bound to principles that he had formulated, 
he would issue orders for the artillery to open heavy 
fire upon that place. But he considers for a moment, 
and then sends out instructions that the situation is 
to be relieved by bombing from aeroplanes or by 
whatever other method his experience as a strategist 
leads him to believe will give the greatest surprise, and 
have the most telling effect. He is not a mere auto- 



MAN'S FREEDOM, AND MAN'S SOUL 101 

matic center for the conversion of afferent impulses 
(despatch-riders' messages, etc.), into efferent mes- 
sages along the path of least resistance, viz. according 
to predetermined plan. He uses his intelligence; he 
interprets messages, passes them quickly through the 
weighing-room of his reason, and decides by a definite 
act of free-will that he will depart from the plan al- 
ready formulated. 

The existence or non-existence of free-will in man is 
a matter of such importance, in the light of what is 
to follow, that it is entitled to further consideration. 
The problem is age-long, and has been the source of 
much perplexity, and it is worth noting that the great- 
est opponents of the idea have belonged to two oppo- 
site camps. The materialist, who explains everything 
in terms of matter and energy, reduces all human ac- 
tion to nerve reflexes, and holds that man can have no 
free-will because such an idea would contradict the doc- 
trine of the conservation of energy. He trips into the 
pitfall of confusing psychological and physical activ- 
ity, which belong to different planes. The other body 
of opponents belong to that school of theological belief 
which is chained to a crude and barbaric doctrine of 
predestination. They believe that whatever happens 
was and is predestined; they rob man of all freedom 
and make him the impotent slave of the will of God. 
For them man's free-will becomes a perilous delusion. 
But, as Dr. Denney has said : " Absolute predesti- 
nation is not the explanation of anything in the moral 
world. The man who asserts predestination thus, 
without mitigation or remorse, has cancelled the world 
of history and experience." * 

Neither the materialist nor the narrow theologian is 

1 The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, by the late Prin- 
cipal James Denney, D.D. 



102 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

right. Man has free-will. And, having free-will, he is 
ipso facto something more than matter; for mere 
matter cannot have the power of self-determinism. 

In animals all acts are the direct, immediate, and au- 
tomatic outcome of stimuli. Where two stimuli act co- 
incidently the animal responds to the stronger. There 
is no analysis, no reasoning, no delayed judgment. 

The lizard basking on a sunny wall darts off when 
the shadow of a passer-by falls upon it. Here the 
impulse of fear has been strong enough to overcome 
the impulse to enjoyment produced by the warmth of 
the sun, and fear causes flight. Between the lowest 
forms of animal life and man there is a growing com- 
plexity in the response to stimuli, and among the 
higher animals one might almost imagine that some 
acts were not automatic and instinctive; just as, on the 
other hand, one must admit that human beings tend 
to become more or less of automata. Habit tends to 
make us surrender our free-will and to react in pre- 
cisely the same way to the same or similar stimuli, so 
that, given certain conditions, our intimate friends can 
often predict what our conduct will be when faced by 
an emergency. Through the frequent repetition of 
certain acts, beaten paths of low resistance are driven 
through the tangled thicket of nerve-cells and nerve- 
processes in our brain and the connection between af- 
ferent and efferent centers is made easy. The im- 
pulse flows in, and finds an easy access to the efferent 
nerve, and passes out in action, without any interven- 
tion of the somnolent will. So that by failing to exer- 
cise our free-will, we reduce our actions to the level 
of mere animal automatism. But still we are defi- 
nitely free, and even the most shackled slave of habit 
can and does break loose from his traditions, and, to 
the surprise of his friends, may assert his personality 



MAN'S FREEDOM, AND MAN'S SOUL 10S 

in a new way by the exercise of his free-will. But we 
are only free when we exercise our freedom. It is a 
form of wealth which we only possess in the spending 
of it. We are conscious of it especially when we make 
a choice which entails a sense of responsibility. In our 
own minds we distinguish between a free-will act and 
one in which the obvious exercise of our freedom does 
not play a part. 

It must be clearly understood that when we speak of 
the freedom of the will we are not blotting out all an- 
tecedent causes. Schopenhauer fell into this error. 
Our freedom consists not in the empty power of exer- 
cising a motiveless will, but in the liberty we have of 
choosing between different or conflicting motives, bal- 
ancing them one against the other, analyzing them, in- 
specting them from every side, and then acting. Hu- 
man conduct is the outcome of motives, just as animal 
action is the product of impulses. The animal acts 
on the strongest impulse ; we act in response to the 
strongest motive, but (and this makes the tremendous 
difference), the motive upon which we act does not be- 
come the strongest until we have chosen it by the exer- 
cise of our will. Free-will enables us to choose the mo- 
tive upon which we shall act; and when we will to act 
we do not do so, as it were, through the empty air. 
Once having willed, which is a purely psychological 
process, we must conform to biological and physico- 
chemical laws to translate our will into effect. We 
are conditioned by matter; we act through brain and 
nerve tissue. 

There is a further great difference between the ac- 
tions of animals, and the free-will activities of man. 
In the animal kingdom the response to the stimulus is 
immediate, but in man an impulse may be supplied, or 
a motive furnished, and action need not follow for 



104 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

days or weeks. Judgment, reason, anti-imptilsive 
effort have come into play. The matter is being con- 
sidered. There is no parallel phenomenon met with in 
creatures lower than man. It is a phenomenon which 
is only possible among free agents. However many 
opponents the doctrine of free-will may have we must 
recognize that the whole fabric of society has been 
built up on the tacit assumption that man is a free 
agent. They reap the benefits which flow from a doc- 
trine, translated into practice, in which they do not be- 
lieve. Their position is somewhat untenable. If man 
has no free-will all punitive or repressive legislation 
directed against the wrongdoer is an insult and an in- 
justice. 

Though it is often difficult to tell where automatic 
action ends and free-will comes into play, it is more 
difficult to determine where man's freedom of will ends 
and the will of God comes into operation. We are 
face to face with a hard problem. If God is omnipo- 
tent and omniscient, and rules and controls everything, 
seeing the end from the beginning and antecedently 
determining all events, how can man have any scope 
for the exercise of his freedom? The difficulty seems 
insoluble, but there is a way out. It is to be found 
in the recognition of the fact, which experience and 
history both confirm, that God has delegated to man 
some part of His work in the world. He has made His 
creature in some sense a co-creator. He has not kept 
him as a puppet on a string, but has given him the 
golden gift of reason, with which to use his freedom 
and work out his destiny ; and in working it out he 
influences his fellow-men, he fashions history. But the 
omnipotence of God is not ruled out in this, nor is 
His foreknowledge. Like a careful teacher who runs a 
rapid eye over the long calculation which has puzzled 



MAN'S FREEDOM, AND MAN'S SOUL 105 

and distressed a child, He sees where the error has 
crept in which might interfere with the correct result, 
and with a touch of the finger it is put right. Man's 
free-will used wrongly has sometimes introduced chaos 
into order, and almost ruined the world. And when 
this has happened God has frequently restored order 
by catastrophe. 

We are so accustomed to admire the harmonious 
working of natural laws that we have become blind 
to the possibility of catastrophe being an instrument 
of God. Those who live on the edge of catastrophe, 
who witness it in operation, are too close to see it in 
correct perspective. It is only when such an up- 
heaval is regarded down the long vista of the years 
that the control of the directing Mind behind it be- 
comes apparent. All the witness of history testifies 
to the cleansing, revivifying, and correcting power of 
events which their immediate spectators considered to 
be world disasters. When God gave man free-will He 
embarked upon a great experiment; but He knew all 
the factors in the experiment, and saw how the misuse 
of the gift might lead to human pain and human suf- 
fering, and seeing, knew that now and then man's 
error would need to be corrected by upheaval and ex- 
plosion. 

Free-will is a function of the soul, for it is independ- 
ent of those laws which govern matter, animate or in- 
animate. And what is the soul? It is that directive 
factor and controlling principle which is responsible 
for our personal identity, our expression of ourselves, 
our personality. Linked to the body through the 
mind and brain, it is the energic factor responsible for 
the weaving or development of the body along the 
lines set by species and heredity. That is on its lower 
side. It reaches down to the body, but it also reaches 



106 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

up with expectant hands into the vastness of the In- 
finite, if haply it may touch the feet of God. It em- 
braces the intelligence, the will, and the emotions, and 
it is the great reservoir in which we keep stored our 
mental experiences. And with and through it we wor- 
ship. 

The body, and, especially, the brain, are the phys- 
ical organs through which it gets into touch with 
the material world. Through them it is brought into 
practical relations with the great physical realms of 
matter and energy. It can, though it is an imma- 
terial and non-spatial entity, through using the bod} 7 , 
itself a material thing, subordinate matter and energy 
to its own ends. But conversely it may be acted upon 
by material things as every one must admit who has 
felt his emotions stirred by a beautiful sunset, by 
such a piece of art as the Gothic facade of the Church 
of St. Ouen, or by the appeal of an exquisite harmony. 
The beauty of a sunset is a material thing in so far 
as it consists of waves of light, refracted, reflected, in- 
terfered with and commingled, and an exquisite har- 
mony reaches our ears as rhythmic vibrations in the 
material fabric of the atmosphere. These sensory im- 
pressions conveyed through material channels, and con- 
sisting of energy expressing itself through matter, 
enter our brains as stimuli of sensation ; but it is the 
soul, and not the brain, that interprets them and re- 
sponds to their message in the up-welling of emotion. 
So it is apparent that the nexus and interaction be- 
tween the soul and the body is an intimate one. 

A soul of a kind may be incorporate in animals 
lower than man. Possibly a bird may praise God 
in its song, and may even worship Him, and a flower 
may pour its perfumed chalice at His feet; but crea- 
tures lower than man cannot distinguish between moral 



MAN'S FREEDOM, AND MAN'S SOUL 107 

evil and moral good. They can have no moral life, 
and it is in the moral realm that the soul becomes 
spiritually directed and can lay hold on God. 

Sir Oliver Lodge has said: " Soul appears to be 
the link between ' spirit ' and * matter,' and according 
to its grade it may be chiefly associated with one 
or with the other of these two great aspects of the uni- 
verse." 

That the soul is a real entity, and not a mere 
imagination of the philosophers and theologians has 
been proved a thousand times for those who have eyes 
to see it in the trenches of Flanders and France. Over 
and over again the conditions there have been so ap- 
palling that if man were only flesh and blood he would 
long since have given up the fight. But his " spirit " 
— the soul in him — has steadied his body when the 
temptation was strong in him to turn and flee, and be- 
cause he is a spiritual being and not a mere machine 
of flesh, his soul has triumphed and he has " stuck it " to 
the end. His whole physical being may have revolted, 
but the little spark of divine fire in him has won the day. 
When the Germans in a whirlwind rush were endeavor- 
ing to break through to Amiens, and by sheer weight 
of numbers were pushing back that gallant line which 
may bend, but never breaks, the great consolation of- 
fered by the war correspondents was that, though we 
were giving ground and losing men and guns, the 
" morale " of our soldiers was unbroken. Unwittingly 
they were paying a high tribute to the indomitable- 
ness of the soul, of which " morale " may be called 
an exhalation. 

Among primitive peoples the belief in the soul is 
surrounded by all manner of superstitions. Any mys- 
tery tends to become weed-encumbered with such ac- 
cretions. But the nucleus of the idea is there, and its 



108 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

distribution is universal. And the idea is not con- 
fined to primitive people, but has received in all ages 
the intellectual assent of the noblest minds the world 
has ever known. If it were nothing more than a vain 
imagination it would long since have vanished out of 
human life. But it persists and has an influence as 
potent among thinking men to-day as it ever had. It 
commands their intellectual assent, and, what is more 
important, it shapes their lives, which it would never 
have done had it been a myth invented by some prim- 
itive thaumaturgist in order to secure ascendancy over 
his dupes. 

In all ages it has had its critics who, like Voltaire, 
have sought with less reason and ridicule to pour con- 
tempt upon the idea, and shake men's faith in the ex- 
istence of the soul. But, though the poison of their 
sophisms may have blighted some lives, they have 
never been able to kill the universal belief. They 
have been like a band of blood-thirsty school-boys pur- 
suing with murderous but ineffective pebbles a beauti- 
ful and elusive bird. 

We do not discover the soul under the microscope, 
nor in the test-tube in the physiological laboratory, 
nor can we with scalpel and forceps lay it bare in the 
dissecting room ; but we can see it, even though our eyes 
are veiled, in the illumined lives of men and women, 
and we are conscious of its presence in our own being. 



CHAPTER VIII 

WHAT IS LIFE? 
A living dog is better than a dead lion." 



Ecclesiastes iv:12. 



" Avec une force quelconque de la nature on peut obtenir toutes 
les autres, sauf celles qui animent les etres." 

Dr. Gtjstave le Bon. Hier et Demain. 

What is life? This is a question which has puzzled 
the physiologist, the psychologist, and the theologian. 
Each in his own way, using the terms of his own craft, 
has attempted to define it, but as yet no perfect and 
universally accepted definition has been reached. 
Aristotle spoke of it as " The assemblage of the op- 
erations of nutrition, growth, and destruction." 
Bichat called it " The sum total of those functions that 
resist death," and this definition, through its terseness, 
attained to a wide celebrity. But it is faulty, in so 
far as it fails to recognize that death is as much a 
phenomenon of life as is birth. Herbert Spencer de- 
fined it as: "The continuous adjustment of internal 
and external relations." But this is neither sufficiently 
distinctive nor precise. It has been said of all defini- 
tions of life hitherto suggested that they would apply 
to crystals as accurately as to living things. 

Let it be at once admitted that neither science nor 
philosophy can tell what life really is. We know 
life only through its activities. Has it any real ex- 
istence, or is it a thing vainly imagined? Matter we 
know only through the sensations it produces in us, 

109 



110 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

and our interpretation of them. It may have no ob- 
jective reality apart from mind. The mind, which we 
cannot see, may possibly be the only real thing in the 
Universe; and our little lives, which to us seem charged 
with reality, may have no existence outside the mind of 
God. We, and the whole Universe as we see it, may be 
nothing more than thoughts passing through the mind 
of the Eternal. But can a thought be conscious of 
its own self? It seems impossible. 

Life is something whose definition cannot be ex- 
pressed in words. Words are dead symbols. But 
though it cannot adequately be defined, very serious 
endeavors have been made in all ages to explain it. 

One of the earliest doctrines put forward to explain 
the mystery of life was the doctrine of Animism. 
Primitive man, as we have already seen, pursued in the 
sunlight by his shadow, early concluded that he had 
a double. This double was his soul or spirit, and he 
regarded life as the expression of the activity of his 
soul working through and making use of his body. 
This idea, no unworthy contribution to knowledge, ul- 
timately became extended to all living things, animals 
as well as plants ; and by a further extension there 
grew out of it the doctrine of the transmigration of 
souls, which is still held by many people. Early in 
the eighteenth century a German physician, philoso- 
pher and chemist, Stahl, enunciated a modernized 
theory of animism. He restricted the anima, or soul, 
to the human being, and made of it the governor of all 
bodily activities, from digestion to thought. It was 
the direct cause, without any intermediary, of all or- 
ganic functions. Through it, according to Stahl, the 
muscles contract, the lungs expand, the heart beats. 
It is at once the captain, the engineers, the crew, the 
stokers of the ship, as well as being the ship-builder 



WHAT IS LIFE? Ill 

and ship-repairer. The theory exposed itself to much 
hostile criticism, some of which was little more than 
ribald mockery ; but the most serious criticisms came 
from the philosophers. They pointed out the extreme 
difficulty of establishing any direct action of the soul 
upon the organs of the body, because they belong 
to different spheres of being. The soul is a spiritual 
entity; the body is a material organization. Being 
such they cannot, the philosophers hold, directly in- 
teract upon each other. In their day Descartes and 
Leibnitz, perplexed by the same problem, had com- 
pletely separated the soul from the physical body, and 
denied all direct linking and all interaction between 
one and the other, reducing their relation entirely to 
metaphysical conditions. They did much to establish 
a purely mechanical and materialistic conception of 
the nature of life. 

Some forty years ago a serious attempt was made 
by a French physician, Chauffard, to work out a new, 
logical, and acceptable theory of animism. He re- 
garded the soul as having dual functions. He attrib- 
uted to it a mental, and a somatic or bodily side. Its 
mental side is involved in the consciousness of man, in 
his acts of thought, in the exercise of his will. Its 
somatic or bodily side influences the bodily processes 
not, as in the case of the animism of Stahl, by direct 
interference, but by unconscious impressions or in- 
fluences exerted along the line of primordial laws. The 
distinction between Stahl's animism and that of Chauf- 
fard is perhaps a little difficult to comprehend. By 
Stahl's theory, the soul was the ship's captain ; but he 
was the whole crew as well, doing everything himself. 
If he wished the ship to go faster he with his own 
hands stoked the furnace. According to Chauffard, 
the ship's captain engaged in none of these menial 



112 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

but necessary activities in person. He lived on the 
bridge. He stoked the fire only indirectly by sending 
messages through the ship's telephone for " full steam 
ahead." The distinction is rather fine, regarded even 
in this material way. But this two-fold aspect or 
modality of the soul is capable of explaining the man- 
ifestations of all forms of life, in so far as it enables 
us to imagine vital activities carried on without con- 
sciousness, as, for example, in the lower forms of animal 
and plant life. It establishes between the soul and all 
life a possible continuity. 

Opposed to animism was the doctrine of vitalism. 
Vitalism made of the fact of life a phenomenon apart. 
It separated it from the soul and from all non-living 
matter. It made of life something which could not 
be explained in terms either of the laws of physics or 
the laws of thought. The modern conception of vital- 
ism still erects a strong barrier between itself and the 
psychical side, but the barrier between life and inan- 
imate matter is lowered if not broken, and the vitalists 
of to-day see that physics and chemistry operate within 
the living body just as they do in the world outside. 
According to the modern advocates of vitalism, the 
vital principle watches over and directs the physico- 
chemical phenomena incidental to and necessary for 
life, but does not produce them. The early supporters 
of vitalism were apparently uncertain of what they 
intended their doctrine to mean. At first their " vital 
principle " bore a striking resemblance to the anvma 
of the animists. When time and criticism had gnawed 
at the theory, the principle became something less 
easily comprehensible, and ultimately, instead of being 
a principle, it was reduced to a direction or plan ac- 
cording to which life conformed itself. Though re- 
duced to these emaciated proportions, vitalism has 



WHAT IS LIFE? 113 

never completely lost hold, and to-day it has many ad- 
herents. 

The third theory for the explanation of life is a 
purely materialistic one. Materialism holds that mat- 
ter is the one and only ultimate reality. Let it be 
said, once again, that even a materialist would have 
no knowledge of this only ultimate reality without 
mind, which reveals it to him. According to the ma- 
terialistic doctrine life is the sum total of all the phys- 
ical and chemical operations taking place in a living 
body, be it a blade of grass or an intelligent, reasoning 
human being. From the remarkable phenomena of 
disintegration and integration constantly in progress 
in the leaves of a tree, right up to the highest mental 
functions of the philosopher, speculating on lofty moral 
problems, judging between right and wrong, passing 
his conduct through the crucible of conscience, all can 
be reduced to purely material terms, and explained as 
the outcome of the interaction of material atoms. 
Crude and repulsive as such a conception must seem 
to any one who has lived even for a moment in the 
vibrant atmosphere of an altruistic emotion, it cannot 
be denied that there is much about life which lends 
buttresses to the doctrine. But let us examine care- 
fully what it means, and realize clearly what our ad- 
herence entails before we subscribe to it. If we accept 
the materialistic doctrine of life we automatically bind 
ourselves to the belief that the human body is nothing 
more than a machine, and that all its activities, from 
the lowest to the highest, can be written down in terms 
of physics and chemistry. Let it at once be admitted 
that many of the functions of life are purely mechan- 
ical, and that the laws of physics and the laws of chem- 
istry are constantly in operation in a living being. 
But a living being is not a machine. For what ma^ 



114 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

chine, in process of operation, not only performs the 
work set it to accomplish, but at the same time keeps it- 
self in repair, controls its own activities, adjusts itself 
to new conditions, and, instead of dissipating energy 
as it functions, can actually accumulate energy? And 
what machine can build and assemble itself? The 
primitive cell from which a human being originates 
grows and divides, grows and divides again, and after 
a long series of operations ultimately appears as a 
beautiful child, perfect in limb and body. The mate- 
rialist would have us believe that all this complicated 
series of wonderful and purposive phenomena was 
brought about by the action of the ambient media, or, 
in other words, the appropriate environment upon the 
inherent physico-chemical properties of specialized 
protoplasm. Even in the world-famous works of Mr. 
Ford no motor-car has yet built itself up from a single 
nut, without the intervention of an intelligent mind 
working from without. But, it may be said, such a 
comparison is unfair. A nut or bolt from a motor- 
car is a lifeless thing; a speck of protoplasm has life, 
and it is that which makes the difference. That is 
sufficiently obvious to every one. What one should like 
the materialist to explain is by what interaction of 
matter, by what physico-chemical changes within its 
substance, by what influence of its ambient medium did 
the protoplasmic cell become thus endowed? If he 
cannot carry his theory back and explain things from 
the beginning, his idea falls to pieces like a house of 
cards. 

There is another serious objection which may be 
urged against this mechanistic idea of life. If the 
body is a machine, it is the only machine which con- 
sists entirely of the agents from which it derives its 



WHAT IS LIFE? 115 

motive power. No motor-car was ever made of petrol ; 
no steam-engine consists of coal and water. 

Plausible though it be, the theory cannot stand as 
it is at present held by the majority of materialists. 
There is still something lacking. 

As has already been said, many of the phenomena 
of life, if not all, are accompanied by physico-chemi- 
cal changes. Some of the physico-chemical changes 
are well recognized, and may be carried out in a test- 
tube. But, though physics and chemistry certainly 
play a great part in the economy of the body, they 
do not explain life, and a living being, in virtue of 
life that is in him, can do things in direct opposition 
to the recognized laws of both these sciences. Kill 
a man, and unless his body is supported, it will fall 
to the ground. Gravity, a physical principle, has 
pulled his body down. But a living man is able to some 
extent to oppose himself to the force of gravity. He 
can raise himself, and stand erect. Or fill a test-tube 
with boiling water and keep it in a room where the tem- 
perature of the atmosphere is only 40° Fahrenheit. In 
process of time, if one immerse a thermometer in the 
water, it will give a reading which corresponds exactly 
with the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere. 
But place a healthy man anywhere on the face of the 
globe — in the Arctic circle, or on the equator — and 
with a carefully tested thermometer take his tem- 
perature under the tongue. The reading will be con- 
stant, viz. 98.4° Fahrenheit, or, if it vary at all, it will 
only be by a fraction of a degree, for the chemistry 
of living things enables the qualities of the living thing 
to remain identical even in conditions of change. So 
that chemical and physical processes, conditioned by 
the activities of life, differ from similar processes met 



116 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

with in things inanimate. An undiluted mechanistic, 
physico-chemical, or materialistic conception of life, 
call it what you will, seems to present us with ever 
fresh difficulties. 

When the microscope was first developed to that 
height of excellence with which we are familiar to-day, 
there were some who thought that the secret of life 
would be deciphered in the minute structure of the cell. 
But, marvelous though the results of microscopical in- 
vestigation have been, and interesting as are the facts 
concerning the minute structure of the cell-nucleus, the 
spongioplasm and the hyaloplasm which patient, dis- 
ciplined, and keen-eyed scientists have discovered, the 
secret of life has proved to be out of the range of the 
most powerful lens. From the point of view of the 
functional activity of the cell, microscopical research 
had been almost sterile. The microscopist has suc- 
ceeded in examining the bricks and mortar, the rooms 
of the house, the furniture with which they are plen- 
ished, but he has not discovered the hidden inhabitant. 
So, in despair, he has been thrown back on the concep- 
tion of ultra-microscopic corpuscles, such as plastids, 
idioblasts, plasomes, biophores — satisfying himself by 
coining Greek names to give a special dignity to hy- 
pothetical entities he cannot see, but must imagine, 
if the mechanical theory of life is to hold. It is not 
alone in the realm of metaphysics that the imagination 
is sometimes allowed to run riot. 

It is interesting to remember that all the functions 
of the body which are absolutely essential for the 
maintenance of our life are, so to speak, automatic 
and outside our control. We cannot at will suspend 
or cause to cease the beating of our heart. We are 
unable, except for a brief period, to stop the function 
of respiration. We can exercise no voluntary control 



WHAT IS LIFE? 117 

over the activities of organs like the liver or the kidneys 
which are essential to rid the body of the poisons which 
it evolves by every act of life. Life is something elu- 
sive; it is meant to be outside our control; and though 
a man may, by laying violent hands upon himself, work 
such destruction upon his vital organs that the delicate 
mechanism is thrown out of action, and life can no 
longer go on, he requires to make use of some adventi- 
tious weapon; he cannot, by merely willing it, extin- 
guish the vital spark within him. 

From very early times it has been held that the con- 
trolling principle was situated in some particular 
organ or structure of the body. The Jews believed 
that it resided in the blood — a not unreasonable 
idea when we remember to what an extent animal sac- 
rifice was an essential part of their religion. The 
animal whose throat was cut by the priest's knife ren- 
dered up its life as its blood flowed over the floor of 
the outer court of the tabernacle ; and the worshipers 
came to identify the blood with the life. 

At the end of the sixteenth century Van Helmont 
suggested that life resided in one of the orifices of the 
stomach. About a century and a half later, Dr. Lorry 
discovered that a very small wound inflicted at a cer- 
tain point in the brain of an animal caused immediate 
death. This discovery provoked considerable interest, 
and the point in question became recognized as " the 
vital knot." The precise situation of this important 
spot was accurately described by Flourens in 1827. 
It is a small area in the floor of the fourth ventricle 
of the brain, close to the place where the eighth or 
auditory pair of nerves enters it. The point is very 
small, but its destruction brings about the speedy 
death of the animal. As, however, physiological re- 
search advanced it was discovered that this point was 



118 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

not in reality the seat of life, but was only the area of 
brain-substance responsible for the automatic perform- 
ance of the act of respiration; and it was found that 
this point might be destroyed, but the animal would 
continue to live so long as respiration was carried 
on by artificial means. One of the chief discoveries 
about life, which the research of the nineteenth century 
gave us, was the recognition of the fact that the vital 
principle is not located at any special point, but is 
distributed all through the body. Each organ lives 
its own life, and each cell in every part of the body 
lives its own life too. All these separate lives are indi- 
vidual but yet communal, and in a normal individual 
work together in perfect harmony. Life has been de- 
centralized; it sits in no special throne, and though 
three organs, the brain, the lungs, and the heart, are 
of paramount importance to the bodily economy, not 
one of them can be said to be the home of life. Recent 
research has presented us with extraordinary results, 
and it has been found that, when the necessary condi- 
tions are fulfilled, body-cells and even whole organs will 
continue to live and perform their functions for pro- 
longed periods after their detachment from the body 
proper. We are therefore forced to conclude that 
every organ and every cell in the body has an indi- 
vidual life of its own. The sum total of these indi- 
vidual lives, blended into harmony, makes the harmon- 
ious physical life of the individual. Life is not the 
unique possession of any one organ; it belongs to the 
whole. 

This enables us to understand why life is so diffi- 
cult to destroy. One may pound a clump of yeast- 
cells with a Nasmyth hammer, and yet they will re- 
main capable of producing fermentation, which is one 
way in which their vital activity expresses itself. And 



WHAT IS LIFE? 119 

one may subject a human body to almost inconceivable 
mutilations, and yet life will continue. A very little 
thing may produce death: a crumb of bread in the 
larynx, a drop or two of blood oozing from a fragile 
vessel in the brain, a little clot from an inflamed vein, 
trapped in the meshwork of the lungs ; but, on the 
other hand, very formidable wounds and very extensive 
injuries may be sustained, and still life may go on. 
Long before the world-war there was on record the 
case of a man through whose brain a crow-bar passed, 
and yet he continued to live; and to-day there are 
men moving about among us, apparently in perfect 
health, with bullets or fragments of shell in their brains, 
in their lungs, and in their hearts, and in every sit- 
uation in the body where a wound was at one time 
regarded as necessarily fatal. For life can withstand 
many assaults, and accommodate itself to many strange 
conditions. 

Can we get any nearer to understanding what life 
may be? The key is somewhere in the Universe. Let 
us look abroad. 

The forms of energy met with in nature are many, 
and at first man was very slow to learn anything about 
them. Even now, though science has deciphered much, 
there are many of the pages in the book still unread. 
From the moment when the first man opened his eyes 
he became aware of the existence of light. But to dis- 
cover what light really consists of was left to the scien- 
tists of the seventeenth century. Euclid, the mathe- 
matician, as was perhaps natural, was the first to point 
out that light travels in straight lines. Newton, be- 
tween the years of 1666 and 1671, while his ideas on 
gravitation were maturing, turned his attention se- 
riously to the study of light, and greatly increased our 
knowledge of it. Descartes had broken up a ray of 



120 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

light by passing it through a prism into the primary 
colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and 
violet, and had pointed out that these were the colors 
of the rainbow. But it was left to Newton to explain 
the cause of the appearance of these different tints. 
He succeeded in demonstrating that so-called white 
light really consists of differently colored rays, which 
are refracted at different angles when they pass 
through a prism. At the same time Roemer, a Danish 
astronomer, was measuring the velocity of light, and 
succeeded in determining that it travels at the rate of 
190,000 miles per second. More modern investigation 
has established the rate as being 186,000 miles per 
second ; but, considering the quality of his instruments, 
Roemer's calculation was wonderfully accurate. These 
discoveries were made before the nature of light was 
known. Newton suggested that light was composed 
of innumerable infinitesimal and invisible particles, 
emitted by luminous bodies ; a hypothesis that satisfied 
some of the facts. But Huyghens enunciated his un- 
dulatory theory, which teaches that light consists of 
vibrations or waves in the ether, started by all luminous 
bodies. This theory, now well established and elab- 
orated by the work of Young, is still the accepted one. 
Heat was another phenomenon of energy, and, al- 
though men were making daily use of it, their ideas of 
what it was were for long confused and perplexing. 
Bacon had suggested that it was a movement of some 
kind, but until 1798 it was generally regarded as an 
invisible fluid, which overflowed from hot substances, 
and could mix itself with the mercury in a thermom- 
eter, causing it to swell and therefore rise in the tube. 
That heat is really motion was proved by Count Rum- 
ford, largely in consequence of an accidental observa- 
tion which he was quick-witted enough to pursue. In 



WHAT IS LIFE? 121 

a cannon factory in Munich he noticed that the metal- 
borer as well as the cannon became very hot as the 
grinding proceeded. Many men must {have noticed 
this before. It was left to the genius of Rumford to 
explain it. He made a detailed and careful series of 
experiments, as the result of which he determined once 
and for all time that motion can be converted into 
heat. It was left for Sir Humphrey Davy to make 
the deduction, verified by experiment, that heat is mo- 
tion. He described it as " a peculiar motion, probably 
of the corpuscles of bodies, tending to separate them." 

To some inquiring Greek, whose name is lost to us, we 
owe the first discovery of electricity. He found that 
if he rubbed a piece of amber (electron) it would at- 
tract little pieces of straw and odds and ends of dry 
and light debris. It was apparently a very little 
discovery, something that any child might have no- 
ticed and laughed at; but it laid the foundation of all 
that has come or is yet to come for the benefit of 
humanity out of that strange form of energy we call 
electricity. In the first year of the seventeenth cen- 
tury Dr. Gilbert, an English physician, published his 
book on Magnetism. He had carried the work of the 
early Greek observer a little further, and his work was 
extended, widened and applied by Guericke, Du Faye, 
Franklin, Galvani, Volta, and many others, until in 
our own day there is hardly a field of human enterprise 
in which electricity is not impressed into service. We 
propel our trains and tramcars by it, we light and 
heat our houses with its aid, we may cook our food 
and drive our machinery by it, we can communicate 
with others in our own voice through miles of wire with 
its help, and we can transmit messages with the tap of 
a key from one end of the earth to another. It is one 
of the most potent and useful forms of energy known, 



122 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the applications of which we do not fully appreciate, 
and the possibilities of which we have hardly begun to 
guess at. And yet, until the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century, we knew practically nothing about it. 

The last quarter of a century has enriched us with 
three particularly valuable discoveries ; viz. the X-rays, 
the Hertzian waves by which the messages of wireless 
telegraphy are transmitted, and the radio-active prop- 
erties of radium and kindred substances. What ben- 
efits to humanity may yet come from these sources no 
one can tell. 

This long digression, with its recapitulation of some 
of the elementary facts of physical science relating to 
energy in various forms, has been indulged in to show 
how very slow we have been to find out anything about 
the wonderful and mysterious forces with which we 
are surrounded. Much has been learned, but there is 
still much more to learn, and science may yet discover 
that there are powers and forces in the Universe which 
act upon this world and everything in it that are yet 
undreamed of. Since the days of Newton the study 
of the solar spectrum has had perpetual interest for 
the physicist and the chemist, and their studies have 
given to the world much rich information. But be- 
3 7 ond the violet rays in the spectrum there is a long 
series of rays about which, as yet, science has little 
to tell us. They may be rays with infinite potential- 
ities. Some of them, we know, have powers of heating. 
The others, though this is unlikely, may be inert and 
valueless. But it is known they are there, although 
their function is as yet unguessed. And there is pre- 
sumptive reason for believing that there come to our 
little corner of the Universe, out of the vastnesses of 
space, other rays than those of the solar spectrum, to 
which as yet we are completely blind. 



WHAT IS LIFE? 123 

I believe that, sooner or later, life will be found to 
depend on one or other of these unrecognized rajs; 
some form of energy, unique in character, which ex- 
presses itself through protoplasm and through proto- 
plasm alone. As Huxley pointed out, protoplasm is 
the physical basis of all life, whether it be vegetable or 
animal. Protoplasm without this energizing ray is not 
life ; nor is this ray, until it acts upon and through 
protoplasm, life as we know it. Within certain re- 
stricted limits, the chemical nature of protoplasm 
varies. All dead protoplasm, which is the only variety 
that we are able to subject to chemical tests, seems 
to be, so far as our knowledge will take us, identical 
in composition; but there are refinements which our 
crude methods do not allow us to determine. It is, 
however, generally believed that there must be as yet 
undiscovered distinctions between the protoplasm of, 
let us say, a fish, a snake, a bird, a horse, and a human 
being, and, further, there are possibly minute differ- 
ences between the protoplasm found in the bodies of 
any two men. Only on such an assumption can the 
facts of heredity and the maintenance of characteris- 
tic differences between species and species be explained. 
But the differences are beyond the ken of present-day 
chemical methods. Now, I suggest that protoplasm, 
wherever found, becomes the receiver of the energizing 
activity of this special ray, and the manifestations of 
life appear. It will at once be urged that, if this be so, 
death either of plant or animal becomes an impossi- 
bility. Protoplasm is an essential part of the struc- 
ture of both, and if this special ray automatically seizes 
upon protoplasm wherever found and charges it with 
life, how can anything die? The objection is a per- 
fectly fair one, and it is well it should be advanced; 
but it is far from presenting an insoluble difficulty, and 



124 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

in its solution we may discover why it is that disease 
can destroy life. Probably this life-ray only incor- 
porates itself with and manifests itself through proto- 
plasm with a certain very definite molecular composi- 
tion. If this molecular composition is disturbed, if the 
chemical linking of any of the atoms is interfered with, 
it ceases to be protoplasm such as the life-wave can 
act through, and becomes the protoplasm of the chem- 
ical laboratory, which is dead. This opens up for us a 
new conception of how a lethal disease may act. All 
diseases due to micro-organisms, as has already been 
pointed out, are accompanied by the formation in the 
body of toxins or poisons. If these poisons can pro- 
duce combinations with the protoplasm either of the 
whole body or of any organ that is essential to life, 
they may so alter the chemical composition of the 
protoplasm that the life-ray can no longer combine 
with and energize it. That the poisons of disease may 
link themselves in a very intimate and special way with 
protoplasm, we know from the study of diphtheria. 

But, it may be asked, how is death from a mechanical 
condition such as is met with in a broken-down heart, 
or a ruptured blood-vessel in the brain, to be accounted 
for on this theory? The hypothesis still holds good. 
When the heart breaks down, what is known as back- 
pressure occurs, and the tissues become water-logged 
and dropsical. All the protoplasm in the body is then 
under abnormal conditions ; it is bathed by abnormal 
fluids, which may interfere with that fine molecular ad- 
justment of the protoplasm which is a necessary con- 
dition before the life-force will act through it, and so 
death supervenes. 

The rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain will act, 
though more locally, in much the same way. The 
whole condition of the intracranial circulation is upset 



WHAT IS LIFE? 125 

by such an occurrence. Fine chemical changes may 
take place in some of the centers necessary for the 
maintenance of life; the protoplasm then degenerates 
and the life-ray can make no further use of it. Every 
case of death depends upon the involvement, primarily 
or secondarily, of one or other of the organs which 
are essential to life; and, on this hypothesis, all cases 
of death may be explained. 

The theory also enables us to understand the decen- 
tralization of life, which has already been dealt with. 

Further, it gives us a possible clew to some of the 
phenomena of consciousness. When an electric cur- 
rent is passed through a thick bar of copper the re- 
sistance offered to its passage is very low, and only 
a small amount of heat is generated in the process. 
But pass the same current through a very fine wire of 
copper or of platinum. Great heat is generated as 
the current endeavors to force itself through the re- 
sisting channel, and the copper wire may fuse, while 
the platinum glows with light. Consciousness has 
been described as " nerve glow." The limitations of 
language are such, and we are so bound, owing to our 
physical nature, to the material side of things, that we 
are driven to use the terms of the known for the un- 
known. We have no conception of what " nerve glow " 
is except by the use of a crude material analogy as 
above. But let us try to imagine, without pressing the 
analogy too closely, what differences might result from 
passing the life current through highly organized, pos- 
sibly resistant protoplasm in the brain-cells, as com- 
pared with passing the same current through vegetable 
protoplasm. The conception opens up a vista of tre- 
mendous possibilities. Mind is rooted in brain. No 
one will deny that. A tree is rooted in the earth ; but 
its leaves, its blossom, and its fruit owe but a little to 



126 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

their connection with the soil. They derive far more 
from the limitless field of the atmosphere, and from the 
sun. Here, again, the necessity of using material an- 
alogies cribs and hampers the idea. If only we could 
divest ourselves of the necessity of speaking of things 
in terms of matter, it would be much more easy to make 
the meaning clear. 

It is not hard to imagine that to many this theory 
of life may prove startling, and appear to be nothing 
more than sheer, stark, and naked materialism, flaunt- 
ing itself unashamed. They have been brought up to 
believe, and they feel, with that unconscious discern- 
ment that knows more than science can ever teach, that 
life comes from the Creator, and that He holds in His 
hand the life of every one of His creatures. Let us at 
once agree upon the issue. The theory of a life-ray, 
or a life-giving wave or force, is far from being incon- 
sistent with any ideas of the immanence of God in na- 
ture and in human life. Indeed, it is nothing more than 
an elaboration of that doctrine, and a further evidence 
of the fact that, in His dealings with the Universe, the 
Omnipotent works by secondary causes and conditions 
His activities according to principles and laws. For 
the materialist, there are only two real things in the 
Universe — matter and energy. But, so far as he has 
been able to examine them, these two realities are under 
the influence of certain laws. Where the materialist 
fails is in an inherent or assumed incompetence to see 
beyond the law to the law-giver. Matter, energy, and 
laws relating to both are the only alphabet in his book 
of nature. Rays from the sun, rays from the fathom- 
less depths of the infinite, forces of attraction between 
planet and planet, star and star, as they roll on in the 
immensity of space, waves in the ether, rhythmic vibra- 
tions in the atmosphere, atom leaping to atom, leaves 



WHAT IS LIFE? 127 

turning to the light, all prove that God is immanent in 
nature, and for this immanence He employs what we 
call natural forces. Is it an impious assumption to 
imagine that when we come to consider life we shall 
find that the Creator is true to His own methods and 
uses a form of energy which we may call the life-force 
or life-wave to quicken protoplasm to activity? And 
this life-force or life-ray, call it what you will, remains 
in His own hands. As yet, science has not been able 
to detect it, or find means of measuring it, or reducing 
its operations to a written law. It is a special form 
of energy, and when man has combed the beach of that 
sea of infinite space which encircles the earth, and has 
found many more rich and amazing treasures than his 
intelligence has yet led him to discover, I imagine that 
the life-ray will still elude him. For it is a spiritual 
force, and with material instruments and material 
vision we cannot envisage the immaterial. Encumbered 
as we are by a physical body, our faculties of percep- 
tion are limited by the crude agents which we must make 
use of to know anything; and there are many honest 
and anxious people who, try as they will, cannot com- 
prehend the spiritual. They associate it with chican- 
ery, with seances in mephitic rooms, with ghostly ap- 
paritions in haunted houses, and their reason rebels. 
But we must admit the possibility of there being in the 
Universe other things than matter as we know it, and 
energy as we conceive of it. Remember that light is 
said to consist of undulatory vibrations in the ether. 
Huyghens and the scientists of his day, and those sci- 
entists who have since investigated the marvelous prop- 
erties of light, could not imagine undulation or wave 
motion occurring except in a medium of some sort, so 
they were compelled to postulate the ether. The only 
proof we have that light consists of undulations in the 



128 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ether is that it behaves as though it were. Take away 
the ether from the conception, and we are left with 
light — an undulation in nothing. The idea is incon- 
ceivable, because here again the limitations of language 
and the need of material concepts make it impossible 
for us either to comprehend or explain such a phe- 
nomenon. But light may be a form of spiritual energy 
which we, being linked to matter, cannot comprehend 
until we have linked it to matter as well. 

We see the life-ray or the life-force in operation 
when we study living protoplasm. It is only when it 
has joined itself to the protoplasmic sponge-work of 
matter that our material vision can give us any knowl- 
edge of it; and the physico-chemical changes which we 
can observe all through living nature, from the uni- 
cellular monad up to man, are not life, but the func- 
tional concomitants of the life-ray as it expresses itself 
through its physical substratum. This shuttle of 
God darts through the weft and woof of protoplasm, 
weaving the fabric of life in ever-fresh beauty and va- 
riety. 



CHAPTER IX 



THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN 



" Pain 
Clings cruelly to us, like the gnawing sloth 
On the deer's tender haunches." 

Keats. Endymion. 

Life, itself a mystery, is lived in a thicket of mysteries, 
one of the greatest of which is the problem of pain. 
This mystery is of universal and perennial interest. It 
has been the subject of much thought, more writing, 
and endless philosophical discussion, but we are still 
very far from an adequate comprehension of its pur- 
pose. Some men have devoted years of patient inquiry 
and experimental research to the end that they might 
discover means of alleviating pain, while others, too 
often under the cloak of religion, have prostituted their 
intelligence to the invention of fresh and diabolical 
methods of inflicting suffering. Let the records of the 
Holy Inquisition and the Star Chamber, or the hoary 
dungeons of the Max Tower at Nuremberg, bear witness. 

We shall see later that much of the pain and suf- 
fering that afflicts humanity is avoidable, for it comes 
as a natural consequence of the non-observance of cer- 
tain well-defined and elementary laws of life. 

Between the cradle and the grave most of us pass 
along some avenue of pain. For many, much of the 
way is darkened by mental or physical suffering; but 
for most of us the greater part of the way is traveled in 
comparative comfort, so that if, at the end of our 
journey, we could cast up a balance between the pleas- 

129 



130 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ure and pain we had experienced the former would be 
found to preponderate. Between pleasure and pain 
there is a neutral state, namely, that of indifference. 
Pleasure and mere freedom from pain are by no means 
co-extensive. The neutral state intervenes, and in most 
lives bulks largely, shot through here and there by 
pain or illumined with the glow of pleasure. 

At what precise level in the animal kingdom the ca- 
pacity for pain-sensation first appears is uncertain. 
We have, however, good grounds for the belief that 
pain-sensation is a quality of feeling reserved for the an- 
imal kingdom, and does not appertain to any member of 
the plant kingdom. The strange and fascinating phe- 
nomenon exhibited by the leaves of the sensitive plant, 
which shrink from the touch, is not an evidence of pain, 
but is simply a reflex contraction due to a gross stim- 
ulation. For the registering and interpretation of 
a painful sensation a complex nerve mechanism which is 
not found among the members of the vegetable kingdom 
is necessary. 

In the lower reaches of the animal kingdom this 
nerve mechanism is not highly elaborated, and there 
is evidence to show that the capacity for feeling pain 
is much lower among the invertebrates, or backboneless 
creatures, like the leech, the lobster, and the star-fish, 
than among the vertebrates. The capacity for feeling 
pain probably reaches its highest expression in the 
animal kingdom among the mammals, and touches its 
zenith in the case of a gently nurtured, intelligent, and 
delicate woman. Most women bear pain with consid- 
erable fortitude, and it has been suggested that their 
stoicism is due to a lessened perceptive power. This 
explanation of their courage is based upon an unchiv- 
alrous and unproved assumption, made by man. 

Any one who has ever handled a spade has at some 



THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN 131 

time or other divided an earth-worm in two. The 
worm cannot, unfortunately, express in articulate 
speech its opinion of this experience, but the two halves 
of the sundered creature do not behave in a way that 
suggests acute pain. They wriggle off, usually in dif- 
ferent directions, apparently little disturbed by this 
cataclysmic interference with their anatomy. Prob- 
ably, since nerves and nerve ganglia have been discov- 
ered in the worm, this severance provoked an unpleas- 
ant sensation that may have amounted to pain; but 
we cannot imagine that the reluctant worm tugged from 
the wet earth in mid-April by some questing bird 
suffers, even in a minor degree, the physical agony ex- 
perienced by some mediaeval martyr on the rack, or 
that the snail, whose house of shell is dashed to pieces 
against a stone by a hungry thrush, suffers as much 
as some victim hurled down the Tarpeian Rock. Nor 
is it at all likely that Izaak Walton's frog, for whose 
welfare he showed such tender solicitude, enjoining all 
his disciples to " use him as though you loved him," 
suffered as much, when baited alive upon the hook, as 
does a man whose finger is caught in a suddenly closed 
carriage-door. 

Warm-blooded animals suffer more acutely than 
cold-blooded ones, and the higher the development of 
the nervous system and the more cultivated the intellect 
the greater is the capacity for feeling pain. 

The perception and interpretation of painful stimuli 
may be interfered with by certain mental or physical 
conditions. It is wrong to suppose that the stoicism 
of the early Christian martyrs was in any way due 
to their lack of capacity for feeling pain. They were 
probably as capable of feeling pain, under ordinary 
circumstances, as are the men and women of to-day; 
but the intensity of their faith and their condition of 



132 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

religious exaltation were such that by what is called 
a " blocking " process the painful stimuli were shut out 
of their consciousness, which was wholly occupied with 
the rapture of devotion by which they were consumed. 
By a curious perversion of sensation, some of them are 
said to have declared that their torture gave them 
pleasure rather than pain. We read of men and women 
falling asleep while on the rack. This has been re- 
garded as a singular proof of the triumph of human 
faith over suffering ; but I am inclined to believe that the 
so-called sleep was in reality an attack of syncope, 
which mercifully descended upon the victim to protect 
him from his torturers for a little while. But, be that 
as it may, there is no doubt that religious exaltation 
may become a very powerful anodyne. In his picture 
of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Guido Reni gave 
permanent and beautiful expression to this fact. The 
somewhat girlish figure of the youthful martyr is 
pierced by arrows, but there is no look of anguish in 
the eyes, no graven line of suffering on the face, no 
tight-drawn stoical lips, no clenched and knotted hands. 
Instead we see a smile of seraphic confidence, the light 
of an unconquerable faith in the upturned eyes, and 
benediction flowing from the bound but open hands. 

Most of us know from our own experience that con- 
centration of the mind upon some engrossing occupa- 
tion may render us temporarily insensitive to pain. 
Many a man has found relief from an attack of tooth- 
ache or neuralgia in the pages of a good novel, and 
Dr. Robert Hall is said to have preached some of his 
most eloquent sermons while in the throes of renal colic 
— a particularly exquisite form of suffering. 

We have it on the authority of John Ballantyne, who 
acted as his amanuensis, that Sir Walter Scott on many 
occasions was suffering acutely, probably from biliary 



THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN 133 

colic, while he dictated the enthralling romances of 
Ivanhoe, The Bride of Lammermoor, and The Legend 
of Montrose. But, when carried away by his subject, 
he would rise from his couch, and, utterly oblivious of 
pain, walk up and down the room pouring forth his 
flowing sentences and living in person the parts of his 
creatures. 

These facts help us to understand why it is that in 
the heat of battle a soldier may receive a formidable 
wound, and, at the moment, feel no pain. I have 
asked many of the wounded, both officers and men, to 
tell me as accurately as they can recall them, what their 
sensations were when they were hit. Almost invaria- 
bly the answer has been the same, expressed, curiously 
enough, in practically identical language. Whatever 
the missile has been — shrapnel, shell-case fragments, 
rifle or machine-gun bullets — it did not at the moment 
of impact produce any sensation of pain. When the 
wound was felt at all it seems usually to have been as 
a dull, heavy sensation of weight or pressure, and many 
times I have been told that the feeling suggested a vio- 
lent blow with the flat of a shovel. The sensation of 
pain did not arise till later, the length of the interval 
depending upon several conditions such as the nature 
and situation of the wound, and whether or not it per- 
mitted its victim to " carry on " or rendered him at once 
hors de combat. If he were able to carry on, and the 
fighting was stern, the development of the pain-sensa- 
tion might be delayed for a prolonged period. If he 
were knocked out by the wound and compelled to lie 
still waiting for succor, the sensation of pain appeared 
fairly rapidly. In two classes of wounds, however, the 
sensation of pain was practically coincident with the 
reception of the injury. Men who have been wounded 
by a bayonet-thrust, or by the explosion of a hand- 



134 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

grenade thrown directly at them, felt pain immediately 
they were struck. This fact may be explained as fol- 
lows. In almost every case in which a man is wounded 
by a bayonet or a hand-grenade he sees what is about 
to happen, and his mind is already on the alert for 
the sensation of pain, which travels unhindered along 
the nerve track to the sensorium in the brain, and is at 
once perceived. Vision and anticipation have cleared 
the nerve paths so that the message of pain gets free 
access to the brain at once. In a battle a man does not 
see the machine-gun bullet or fragment of shrapnel that 
is whizzing towards him, so that his brain, engrossed 
with other things, is not watching for the sensation 
of pain. So when the blow comes it is a sensation of 
heaviness, and not of pain, that first reaches his con- 
sciousness. 

In the course of my inquiries into this matter I re- 
ceived from a young officer a testimony so remarkable 
as to be almost unbelievable. In fairness it should be 
stated that when he volunteered a description of his ex- 
periences he had not the slightest idea that I was 
specially interested in the question of pain, and there- 
fore his statement was not colored by any desire to give 
me the answer I expected. 

He was hurrying back from the fighting-line to bring 
up reinforcements to a hardly pressed post, when 
he was hit by fragments of one of our own high-explo- 
sive shells which had exploded prematurely. He sus- 
tained very formidable injuries to the lower jaw and 
also to the chest, his jaw being shattered and his chest 
and right lung penetrated by a " through-and-through " 
wound. He says : " I felt no pain. I felt that I had 
received a dull, heavy blow on the face, and I dropped 
forward on my knees and collapsed like a burst motor- 
tyre. I was quite unaware that I had been wounded in 



THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN 185 

the chest, and during the half-hour that elapsed before 
I lost consciousness I felt absolutely no pain. Then 
I forgot everything, and remember nothing more till 
I woke five days later to find myself in a comfortable 
hospital bed. Until I lost consciousness I was quite 
aware of my surroundings, and remember distinctly 
having my gas-mask removed for me, and finding my 
mouth full of blood. I was alert enough to have felt 
any pain if there had been any to feel. The truth is, 
there was none." 

This statement is all the more remarkable because 
of the situation of one of the wounds. The wound of 
the face and jaw was in the area from which the fifth 
cranial nerve collects its stimuli, and any one who has 
had toothache, or has had a sensitive tooth in the 
lower jaw prepared for filling, knows in what sharp 
accents of pain that nerve can express itself. On a 
priori grounds one might think that such a wound in 
the collecting zone of this nerve must of necessity be 
exquisitely painful. But it was not so. His loss of 
consciousness was not due to pain, nor was it, I think, 
altogether due to concussion of the brain, or it would 
have followed immediately on the reception of the 
injury, but from loss of blood, and interference with 
his respiratory functions through the temporary dis- 
ablement of his penetrated lung. It may be that the 
absence of immediate pain in such formidable wounds 
is due to the fact that the blow sustained is so severe 
that the nerve-endings, which are the chief collectors 
of pain-stimuli, are completely stunned, and that, if 
one may so phrase it, a loss of local consciousness is 
produced. But, whatever the explanation, it is a re- 
markable and beneficial provision, for, at the moment, 
the presence of pain would have neither a remedial nor 
a diagnostic value. 



136 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Profound fear may modify the perception of pain 
either by heightening it through apprehension, or low- 
ering it through the preoccupation with which it fills 
the horizon of the mind. A thoroughly frightened 
child has been known to run with bare feet along a road 
strewn with sharp-edged broken stones, till its feet 
were torn and bleeding without feeling pain in the 
slightest degree; and which of us has not discovered 
that the speediest cure for toothache is to ring the den- 
tist's bell? Intense emotion of any kind, such as great 
joy or wild anger, may act as an anodyne to pain, and 
diseases accompanied by profound toxaemia or blood- 
poisoning may so dull the consciousness that it remains 
unaware of a painful stimuli. 

Hysteria, neurasthenia, and that peculiarly distress- 
ing variety of nervous disorganization known as " shell- 
shock " may give rise to anomalies of sensation. In 
some hysterical people large areas of their skin become 
quite insensitive, and may be rudely stimulated in va- 
rious ways without any pain resulting, and I have seen 
a soldier suffering from " shell-shock " whose capacity 
for feeling pain was so interfered with that the skin 
of his legs might be pricked in a hundred places with 
a needle and yet he declared that he felt no pain. 

Just as the capacity for pain-sensation may be di- 
minished by certain mental states, so also it may be 
raised, so that a stimulus which at ordinary times 
would not provoke any discomfort is registered by the 
perceptive faculties as highly painful. Hysterical and 
neurasthenic patients, though they may have in some 
cases a diminished capacity for feeling pain, more often, 
perhaps, react in the opposite direction and become ex- 
tremely sensitive to stimuli of ordinary intensity, which 
may be interpreted when they reach the higher centers 
as acute agony. Patients falling into this category 



THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN 137 

suffer from what is called subjective pains, or pains 
for which no external cause is discoverable. These 
pains are a product of disordered mental action, and 
play a great part in the life of the unfortunate victim 
of hysteria, in whom they are constantly changing 
their situation, their intensity, and their kind. Be- 
hind them there is some deviation from normal mental 
equilibrium, whereby minor impulses are misinterpreted, 
and what would in a normal individual be regarded as 
nothing more than a slight irritation is magnified into 
excruciating torment. These subjective impressions of 
pain are due to faulty associative memory. The stimulus 
reaches the brain, but the associative center makes the 
wrong response; just as the operator at a lantern may 
receive the signal from the lecturer, and throw the wrong 
picture on the screen. This may seem a little obscure, 
but will be explained more fully in what is to follow. 

The apprehension of pain, reinforced by the memory 
of previous experiences tends, as every school-boy 
knows, to heighten pain. A certain eminent judge, 
long since gone to his own Great Assize, who was a firm 
believer in the salutary effect of corporal punishment 
for a certain class of crime accompanied by violence, 
made great use of this psychological fact. He was ac- 
customed to sentence criminals to be flogged, but, with 
a refinement of cruelty which one hopes, for the honor 
of the English Bench, was not intentional, he used to 
divide the administration of the lash into two or more 
doses, to be given at intervals during the culprit's in- 
carceration. So that, to the physical pain of the flog- 
ging, was added the mental torture of the apprehension 
which preceded the second or third administration, such 
apprehension being heightened by the poignant mem- 
ory of the previous experience. 

Physical conditions, almost as much as mental con- 



138 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ditions, may increase the capacity for feeling pain, and 
a person reduced in health by a wasting disease, by 
anaemia or debility is much more intolerant of pain 
than one in the enjoyment of robust health. 

Painful impressions linger for a time in the mind, 
but a merciful forgetfulness tends to sponge them off 
the tablets of the memory, and recollection is unable 
to recreate them again. This is peculiarly true of the 
pains of child-birth. Usually severe and sometimes 
intensified to the limit of human endurance, the mem- 
ory of them is, in most cases, short-lived, and the evan- 
gelist exhibited a shrewd knowledge of life and psy- 
chology when he wrote : " She remembereth no more 
the anguish, for joy. . . ." 

As the mediaeval torturers well knew, repeated stim- 
uli, not one of which in itself is sufficiently powerful to 
provoke pain, may by their constant repercussion give 
rise to acute suffering. This physiological fact lay 
behind that cruel device whereby a drop of water was 
made to fall from a height at short but regular inter- 
vals, either upon the same spot on the victim's fore- 
head, or between his shoulders. One drop had no 
effect ; a hundred successive drops could be borne with- 
out the least discomfort; but when the tale ran into 
tens of thousands, each limpid bead struck the shrink- 
ing skin like a lash of wire, and the torture, if contin- 
ued long enough could break the spirit of the strongest. 
Here practice, as so often happens, was preceding sci- 
entific knowledge, for it was not till long afterwards that 
the physiologists enunciated and were able to explain 
the principle of what they call " summation of stimuli." 
The explanation of the phenomenon is that the recep- 
tive centers in the cerebral cortex, or outer layer of 
the brain, have not recovered from the previous stim- 
ulation before the next arrives. There is a residual 



THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN 139 

stimulation still in action when the next sensation ar- 
rives, and the effect on the brain-cells is cumulative. 
Consequently severe and progressively increasing pain 
is felt. 

One may explain this by a simple illustration. Let 
us imagine that the cell or group of cells in the brain 
which is receiving the repeated stimuli is a cistern fed 
by a pipe which delivers a somewhat larger quantity of 
water than is able to escape in the same time through 
an outflow pipe. If we imagine that the cistern holds 
forty gallons, and that the inflow per minute exceeds 
the outflow by half a pint, a time will come when the 
cistern is filled to overflowing. It contains as much as 
it can hold. It has been filled gradually by the accu- 
mulation of the differences between intake and outflow. 
Similarly, a point is reached in the case of the group of 
sensory cells in the brain when they become " filled " 
with the accumulated residues of repeated stimuli, and re- 
act violently by overflowing in a sensation of severe pain. 

The interpretation put upon painful stimuli by the 
brain differs in kind, and, consequently, several varie- 
ties of pain are described. Thus, we speak of a burning 
pain, and a pressure or tension pain. These qualifying 
adjectives give us a clew to the origin of the sense of 
pain, which is largely a matter of the interpretation 
put upon a stimulus by the centers of association and 
memory. 

The locality in which a pain is felt is usually the 
seat of the mischief which is giving rise to it, and a 
person in normal health, whose nervous system is sound, 
has no difficulty, even when blind-folded, in locating 
the spot at which the pain arises. But this is not the 
invariable rule, and sometimes the situation at which 
pain is felt is a long way from the site of the disease 
responsible for its production. For example, many a 



140 THE ADVENTURE. OF LIFE 

child whose gastric organs are in a condition of sound 
health complains of a frequent and severe stomach- 
ache. In reality he is suffering from disease of the 
bones of his spine, and the sensory nerves which are en- 
tering the spinal canal from both sides of his body 
are being irritated, either jointly or singly by pres- 
sure or by inflammatory products. Sensory nerves 
tend to refer all sensation to their extreme periphery, 
and the pain which in such a case really originates in 
the back, is referred to the nerve-endings over the an- 
terior abdominal wall. In like manner, a child who 
complains of a chronic pain in the knee may really 
be suffering from disease in the hip-joint. It is a mat- 
ter of common knowledge that men who have lost a limb 
will sometimes complain of pain in the foot or toes 
that have long been separated from the body. I have 
recently come across several instances of the kind 
among wounded soldiers, one, who had suffered ampu- 
tation above the knee, assuring me with many protes- 
tations that he had been unable to sleep because of 
acute rheumatic pains in the ankle-joint and foot of the 
absent limb. He suggested, with that humor charac- 
teristic of the British soldier, that the leg which he 
had lost on the Gallipoli peninsula must have been laid 
to rest in a damp grave, and was lodging its complaint 
in this practical but unpleasant fashion with its former 
owner. Cases of this kind are capable of a simple ex- 
planation. Some slender filament of the nerve that 
once acted as the conductor of sensory impressions 
from the foot to the spinal cord, and so onward to the 
brain, has become imbedded in or adherent to the scar- 
tissue in the amputation-stump. Slight variations in 
the condition of the scar-tissue may stimulate the ad- 
herent nerve-filament, and cause it to send a protest of 
pain to the terminal sense-organ in the brain. But 



THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN 141 

this organ has all through the person's life been ac- 
customed to docket every message coming along that 
nerve as a message from the foot, and a life-long habit 
is not easily broken. So, though the foot is no longer 
there, the brain cells which receive the message report 
to the consciousness that a pain signal has come in from 
the foot, and unless the mind bestirs itself to verify the 
message and its source, the point of origin and the seat 
of the pain are not accurately identified. 

Another anomaly of sensation is explained by the 
overflow of excessive stimulation from one cell to an- 
other. Toothache sometimes affords us an example 
of this phenomenon. If a tooth is decayed, and the 
sensitive pulp is exposed, any irritation applied to it is 
conveyed to the brain, and recognized as dentalgia. 
If the irritation is very severe or prolonged the pain 
which at first was localized to the offending molar may 
spread to adjacent teeth, or even to the whole of one 
side of the face. This condition has been brought 
about by the overflow of excessive stimuli from one 
group of cells in the brain to another group of adj acent 
cells which are the terminal receptors of sensory stimuli 
from other branches of the nerve. These freshly in- 
volved receptors refer the commotion which is disturbing 
them to the terminal ends of the nerves which usually 
supply them with sensory impressions, and consequently 
all the teeth on one side may appear to ache. 

For purposes of diagnosis and description it is the 
custom to regard the spinal cord, that great main route 
of communication along which motor impulses descend 
from the brain to the muscles of the trunk and limbs, 
and up which pass all the sensory messages sent from 
the periphery to the brain, as consisting of a series of 
super-imposed segments which are numbered according 
to the particular bone in the vertebral column behind 



142 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

which they lie. This segmental division is artificial, be- 
cause no segment is self-contained; but it serves a use- 
ful purpose for the localization of the processes of dis- 
ease in the cord. It has been observed that if a sen- 
sory nerve which enters the cord at a certain level is 
inflamed, or under the influence of a disease which pro- 
duces pain, those areas of the skin which derive their 
nerve supply from the same segment of the cord are lia- 
ble to become sensitive to the touch. Of this fact we 
have a striking proof in the condition known as angina 
pectoris. The sympathetic nerves which supply the 
heart arise from the segment of the spinal cord which in- 
nervates the upper part of the chest wall and the inner 
side of the arm with nerves of sensation. An attack 
of angina gives rise to stimuli which pass from the 
heart through the sympathetic nerves to the spinal cord, 
and the sensory nerves associated with the same seg- 
ment of the cord react to the stimulation and the pa- 
tient is conscious of acute pain in the chest-wall over 
and above the heart, and along the inner side of the 
left arm. It is a little difficult to present these facts in 
such a way that they can at once be apprehended by 
those who have not an elementary knowledge of physi- 
ology, but an illustration may serve to illuminate the 
matter. When a large stone is dropped into the still 
water of a well its impact produces a splash, and from 
the point at which it breaks the surface an eddying 
series of concentric waves ripple to the margin. These 
are visible to the eye, but in its downward passage 
through the column of water to the bottom of the well 
the stone produces the invisible but none the less real 
disturbance in the hidden depths. This troubling of 
the waters is analogous to the effect produced by the 
sudden impact of a violent sensory stimulus impinging 
upon a segment of the spinal cord. The water of the 



THE PHENOMENON OF PAIN 143 

well down in its depths is driven into the crevices be- 
tween the stones, and the nerve impulse in a somewhat 
similar way produces a disturbance some of which flows 
out through the channel of other nerves attached to the 
same spinal segment. 

So far we have not attempted to define what pain 
is. Like life itself, like death, like matter and mind, 
and time, and many other of the commonest attributes 
of existence, it is extremely difficult to enclose within 
the terms of a definition. 

Cicero described it as an unpleasant movement within 
the body, confusing the resultant motion which often 
follows pain with the sensation itself. Schopenhauer 
believed it to be a " negative experience " — that is, 
negative in contrast to an antecedent " positive expe- 
rience " of pleasure ; and Spinoza regarded it as " an 
emotion whereby the body's power of activity is di- 
minished or checked." None of these definitions, how- 
ever, is satisfactory. We must recognize that in pain 
there are two conditions ; one physical, the impact of 
the stimulus upon the sensory cells in the brain, and 
the other metaphysical, the perception of the stimulus 
and the interpretation and classification of the sensa- 
tion with the aid of memory and the association centers 
which communicate it to the mind. It is not in itself 
a definite entity. It may be called " feeling-tone." It 
is the mental interpretation of a sensation provoked by 
a peculiar quality or intensity of stimulation. There 
can, therefore, be no pain, without consciousness. 

But, difficult though it be to define pain, no definition 
is necessary, since its distribution is universal, and we 
have all experienced it. We may not know how to im- 
prison it in a phrase, but we all know what it feels like, 
and it is infinitely easier to philosophize about than to 
bear. 



CHAPTER X 



THE MECHANISM OF PAIN 



" What a piece of work is man ! " 

Shakespeare. Hamlet. 

Primitive man regarded pain as the work of evil spirits, 
and prehistoric skulls have been found bearing the 
marks of trepanning, an operation that probably had 
been performed to allow the spirit of headache to escape 
from the skull of its victim. At the present day the An- 
damanese attribute all their pains to the activity of 
spirits, and in Malaysia there is a special spirit of stom- 
ach-ache. 

Physiology, however, has taught us that pain depends 
on something else than demonic interference, and has 
worked out the mechanism through which we feel pain. 

When we prick ourselves with a needle or accidentally 
burn a finger with a match we experience a highly disa- 
greeable sensation, but underneath that sensation there 
lies a whole series of physiological processes which must 
be explained one by one before we can understand the 
mechanism by which we are made conscious of pain. 

The skin is our chief organ for collecting sensory 
stimuli, and in this connection it is interesting to re- 
member that the brain and the spinal cord are developed 
from the same layer of the embryo as is the integument. 
This ante-natal embryological connection explains much. 
Immediately underneath the superficial layer of the skin 
lie the terminal branchings of the sensory nerves. 
These end-organs of sensation are widely distributed, 
for all parts of the skin are more or less sensitive ; but, 

144 



THE MECHANISM OF PAIN 145 

as every school-boy knows from practical experience, 
there are variations in their distribution, and under- 
neath a square inch of skin from the tips of the 
fingers or the back of the hands, more of them are to be 
found than under a similar area of skin taken from be- 
tween the shoulders. 

When one of these end-organs is violently stimulated 
by any noxious agent a message is sent along the affer- 
ent or sensory nerve to which it is attached. This 
nerve, gathering tributaries as it goes, passes along the 
limb, and ultimately merges either directly or indirectly 
with one of the posterior spinal nerve-roots. The stim- 
ulus is thus conveyed to the spinal cord, up which it 
travels until it reaches the cerebral cortex or surface of 
the brain. Here it sets up a disturbance of a mechan- 
ical or chemical nature, but we are not aware of pain 
until the higher or mental centers direct their attention 
to the disturbance in the cortical cells and interpret it. 
It has now been definitely proved that molecular 
changes of a well-recognized kind are produced in the 
brain-cells of the cortex by the stimulus of pain. But 
these molecular changes are not pain, just as the tracing 
on the wax-cylinder of a phonograph is not music until 
it has been converted into vibration once again by the 
traveling style or needle and the sensitive tambour. The 
impression made upon the cortical cell is only a register : 
the registered impulse must be interpreted. It is trans- 
lated by the higher centers of association and memory, 
and, after it has been examined, identified, and classified 
it is revealed to the consciousness of the individual. Let 
us personify the centers involved. The association cen- 
ter is suddenly awakened by a call from the brain-cell 
which the nerve impulse has disturbed. It says to itself : 
" There is a nasty commotion going on in the sensory 
cells that receive their messages from the right hand. 



146 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

I wonder what it is: I seem to remember a commotion 
of this kind before. What was it then? Let me ask 
my sister Memory." Memory responds : " I know. 
That particular kind of commotion is only produced by 
burning. Don't you remember? " At once the asso- 
ciation center and memory working together shout to 
the consciousness : " The fingers of the right hand are 
being burned," and consciousness commands the will to 
make the muscles of the arm contract, so that the hand 
is instantly drawn away from the flame. This series 
of operations, the examination of the effects of the stim- 
ulus, the calling in of memory, the joint arrival at a 
conclusion, the reporting to consciousness, and all the 
minute and undetected phenomena that go to make up 
a complex mental act takes place within the confines of 
the infinitesimal space of time that elapses between the 
application of the flame and the withdrawal of the finger. 
It is almost inconceivable that this should be so, and in 
dividing up and separating for purposes of greater 
clearness the various cerebral and psychic phenomena 
that occur, one artificially increases the difficulty of com- 
prehending how so much can happen in such a little 
time. In actual practice the various stages in the proc- 
ess seem to run into each other instantaneously. 

Sometimes, and possibly most often, the withdrawal 
of the finger is a pure sensori-motor reflex, which 
occurs while the message of pain is still on its way 
to the brain. Here the action is even more speedy than 
in the previous case. The sensory impulse from the 
nerve-ending in the finger runs up the nerve and enters 
the spinal cord; there, part of it runs round a nerve- 
arc to the motor-cells in the cord, and without the in- 
tervention of consciousness a motor impulse is sent 
from the cord which causes the fingers to be withdrawn. 
But part of the sensory impulse continues its passage 



THE MECHANISM OF PAIN 147 

up to the brain, where it is recognized for what it is, 
viz. a sensation of burning, and revealed to the con- 
sciousness as such. In actual operation the spinal re- 
flex discharges itself, and the sensory impulse is inter- 
preted by the intellect almost coincidentally. 

A wonderfully exact parallel exists between the mech- 
anism of pain-sensation and the operation of a tele- 
phone. 

When we speak into the transmitter of a telephone 
the column of air vibrating from our throat and lips 
communicates its movements, with all their nuances of 
accent, to a delicately poised membrane. The vibra- 
tions collected by this disc or membrane are conducted 
in the form of an electrical current along the inter- 
vening telephone wire to their destination. At the end 
of the journey the electrical current communicates to a 
disc in the receiver the impulses it has carried along the 
wire. The disc vibrates, and communicates its move- 
ments to a column of air which, striking on the drum of 
a healthy ear, delivers to the listener the message which 
may have been transmitted from a distance of many 
miles. 

As is the case with the pain-stimulus impinging upon 
the brain-cells, the electrical stimulus striking upon the 
disc in the receiver and causing it to vibrate requires 
an intelligent and conscious mind to interpret it. 

We all know at how many points the telephone may 
break down. The transmitter may be out of order, 
and cannot take the message; the wire may be down 
and the impulse cannot pass ; the receiver may be dam- 
aged and fail to respond to the stimulus of the elec- 
trical current ; or the listener may have a defect of his 
hearing apparatus, and be unable to catch and inter- 
pret the message we are eager to give. The possible 
interferences with the propagation of the sensation of 



148 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

pain are analogous and equally numerous. The ca- 
pacity of the end-organ in the skin for receiving stim- 
uli may be reduced, e.g. by cold, by chemical agents 
such as cocaine, or by the processes of disease. The 
conveying sensory nerve — our telephone wire — may 
be cut in two, or its function may be interfered with by 
pressure either from a growth or from a tight ligature 
intercepting its course, or there may be gross changes 
wrought by disease in the spinal cord which interfere 
with its further progress. Or, finally, the receptive 
cells in the brain may be diseased or drugged and fail 
to respond by registering the impression, while at the 
same time the link between the cells of the cerebral cor- 
tex and the higher mental centers may be interfered 
with by disease, or by drugs such as alcohol, chloro- 
form, or ether. The point to recognize and remember 
is that pain is not pain until it is perceived by the con- 
sciousness. All the physical phenomena by which it 
is brought about are purely mechanical interferences. 
At no stage are they pain until the consciousness has 
them revealed to it as such. If we could isolate the 
terminal end-organ of a sensory nerve and detach it 
from its connection with the sensory filament that con- 
veys impulses from it we might subject it to all manner 
of noxious stimuli and no pain would be felt. Or if we 
could sever a sensory nerve from all communication 
with the brain we might pinch it with forceps, irritate 
it with chemicals, and sear it with the cautery, and no 
sensation of pain would follow. Similar assaults made 
upon an isolated segment of the spinal cord would also 
fail to elicit the response of pain, for the sensation of 
pain requires for its manifestation an intact nerve-arc 
with no break or interruption between the terminal sen- 
sory organ, or the nerve of sensation, and the higher 
centers in the brain. 



THE MECHANISM OF PAIN 149 

On the occasion of a recent visit to my dental sur- 
geon I was able to study in my own person the artificial 
interference with the mechanism of pain-perception 
produced by partial anaesthesia. He wished to drill a 
very sensitive tooth, and administered to me by the 
continuous method a mixture of nitrous-oxide-gas and 
oxygen. He had no desire to produce a condition of 
complete anaesthesia or unconsciousness ; he wished to 
establish analgesia — or a loss of the power of per- 
ceiving pain. During the whole operation I was con- 
scious of my surroundings. I could see, I could think 
and talk, I could hear the grating whirr of the burr 
and feel the touch of the operator's fingers. I could 
also feel a continuous sensation of commotion at the 
point where the burr was applied. I was conscious 
enough to be capable of analyzing my sensations, and 
the conclusion I came to while the operation was still 
in progress was that painful stimuli were reaching my 
brain, but owing to a breakdown, produced by the gas, 
of the nexus between the receptive cells in my cerebral 
cortex and my higher centers of association, I was un- 
able to recognize the nature of the stimuli, and conse- 
quently felt no pain. The higher centers are always 
the first to be put out of action, whether the narcotic 
be alcohol, ether, chloroform or gas. The same is true 
in hysterical conditions attended by abnormalities of 
pain sensation. 

Every nerve speaks to the sensorium in its own lan- 
guage. Ordinary nerves of sensation speak in the lan- 
guage of touch, of temperature-sense, or of pain. The 
nerves of special sense are monoglot. If one stimulate 
mechanically the second cranial nerve, the nerve of 
sight, it responds in the only language known to it, the 
language of light. That is why a sudden blow upon 
the eyeball causes one to see stars. There may be pain 



150 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

as well from such a blow, but that is due to the coin- 
cident stimulation of some of the ordinary sensory 
nerves which supply the cutaneous structures adjacent 
to the eyeball. In the same way a violent stimulation 
of the eighth cranial nerve, the nerve of hearing, re- 
sults in the production of a loud and unbearable noise. 

One might reasonably expect that, as the brain is 
the central and necessary organ of sensation, any stim- 
ulus applied to it directly will provoke acute pain. 
But it is a fact well known to surgeons that the cere- 
bral cortex may be touched, or cut, or seared in a con- 
scious patient and practically no pain result. I have 
seen a surgeon pass a probe for two and a half inches 
into the brain of a semi-conscious soldier, without pro- 
ducing the slightest pain, while a stimulus of moderate 
degree applied immediately afterwards to the patient's 
skin provoked an immediate response of pain. 

The explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is 
that those parts of the body most exposed to injury are 
the most abundantly supplied with those end-organs of 
sensation which Sherrington has called noci-ceptors. 
These noci-ceptors are scattered plentifully all over 
the skin. They are most numerous where the body is 
most vulnerable, for life and function must be pro- 
tected. They are particularly abundant on the sur- 
face of such a delicate organ as the eye. A speck of 
dust blown by a March wind on to the conjunctiva — 
the delicate membrane which covers the organ of vision 
— brings this physiological truth forcibly home. As 
the brain is well guarded by the bones of the skull, and 
by the membranes that enclose it, it does not require 
so much protection from noci-ceptors. Consequently 
it is not so well supplied with them. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 

" Then, welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids not sit nor stand, but go! 
Be our joys three parts pain! 
Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe ! " 
Robert Browning. Rabbi Ben Ezra. 

Every one who has devoted a moment's thought to the 
problems of life must have reflected on the purposes 
of pain. To the superficial it must seem a needless phe- 
nomenon, an experience calculated to increase the sum 
total of human misery, but altogether devoid of any 
beneficial qualities. To them it appears maleficent; an 
evil thing to be avoided at any cost ; an invention of the 
devil. Such a view is directly opposed to the truth, 
for, as a matter of fact, the good qualities of pain more 
than outweigh the evil ones. 

Pain is a sentinel which guards the outposts of life 
for us, and without it the citadel would be more easily 
overthrown. It is one of the greatest helps to the phy- 
sician or surgeon in his work. The presence of pain, 
indicated by the sufferer, gives an immediate clew to the 
site of his trouble. The veterinary surgeon whose pa- 
tients cannot describe in articulate speech the locality 
or the nature of the distress they suffer works at a dis- 
advantage as compared with the physician whose pa- 
tients are human beings. The former must rely on the 
secondary phenomena of pain to guide him to the site 

151 



152 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of the mischief ; the latter, by a few direct questions, can 
elicit from his patient not only the precise situation of 
his pain, but also some knowledge of its character and 
intensity. One of the most insidious methods of attack 
used in the present war is the gas-attack. Many of the 
gases employed are invisible, and their presence can 
only be detected by their smell, or by the effects they 
produce. Whenever a gas-attack is detected an alarm 
is sounded, and a rapid message passes along the lines 
and the soldiers put on their ever-ready gas-masks. 
Some forms of disease are as insidious in their onset as 
a gas-attack, and pain is the alarm which calls attention 
to them. 

Let us take as an example appendicitis, a disease that 
of recent years has become very well known. Appendi- 
citis is an inflammation of the vermiform appendix, a 
small blind tube attached to the large bowel. Its 
function is as yet undetermined, though it has been de- 
scribed by a medical student as " A trap for cherry- 
stones, and a source of income for the aspiring junior 
surgeon." Most probably it serves in the human 
economy as a pomt d'appui from which the contrac- 
tions of the large bowel may start. In some animals, 
e.g. the rabbit, the vermiform appendix is of consider- 
able size. In man its average length is 4—5 inches. But 
insignificant in length though it be, and obscure as its 
function is, it has a pernicious liability to become the 
seat of an acute inflammation which, if not dealt with 
promptly and efficiently, may bring about death. 

The disease is attended by a number of symptoms, 
such as elevation of the temperature, quickening of the 
pulse, nausea, and possibly vomiting. These symp- 
toms belong also to other diseases, and are not abso- 
lutely characteristic of appendicitis. One or more of 
them may be absent from an attack; but pain of an 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 153 

acute character, concentrated at a special point, is one 
of the earliest and most indicative features of a seizure. 
The pain may radiate all over the abdomen, but there 
is one spot immediately over the appendix known as 
McBurney's point, where the pressure of a finger pro- 
duces an acute and intolerable exacerbation of suffer- 
ing. The character of the pain, and the definite locali- 
zation of its point of maximum intensity, act as 
finger-posts which direct the surgeon to the appendix, 
and he knows that that vestigial organ is the seat of in- 
flammation. But, in addition to its diagnostic value 
in appendicitis, pain has a protective purpose. Once 
the inflammation is established we find that there is 
a marked rigidity of the muscles of the abdominal wall 
overlying the appendix. Nature knows that the proc- 
esses of repair are best carried on under conditions of 
rest, and the pain in the inflamed organ stirs up a reflex 
action in the spinal cord which throws the muscles 
overlying the appendix into a condition of board-like 
rigidity. This rigidity protects the appendix against 
sudden affronts from without, and also serves to pre- 
vent the weight of the bedclothes increasing the pain. 
The pain of appendicitis, so distressing for the patient, 
is therefore of great diagnostic value, and its presence 
may be the means of saving his life by calling immediate 
attention to the condition. 

Occasionally the surgeon meets with fulminating 
cases of gangrenous appendicitis which are accom- 
panied by little or no pain. These are the most 
formidable cases, and frequently terminate fatally ; and 
a case of ordinary appendicitis in which there is a 
sudden and unaccountable subsidence of pain without 
a retrogression of the other symptoms of the disease 
is not welcomed by the doctor, though the patient and 
his friends may rejoice at the disappearance of the 



154 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

suffering, and imagine, falsely, that it is of happy 
augury. Too often it means that, in the local conflict 
between life and death, death has been the victor, and 
may yet lay claim to the whole organism. Processes of 
disease which are normally attended by pain are, in the 
absence of that symptom, often very serious. 

In diseases like the ordinary fevers, where the whole 
system is invaded almost at once by the infective agent, 
pain is reduced to a minimum. The infection, except in 
the early stages, is not a local one, so it is not necessary 
for pain to sound a clarion note of alarm, as the mis- 
chief has spread beyond the stage at which local treat- 
ment would be of much avail before the disease has de- 
clared itself. A moment's thought will explain why this 
should be. If systemic fevers were attended by severe 
generalized pain, the vital powers of the body would be 
lowered by suffering, and, consequently, the protective 
mechanisms which were described in a preceding chap- 
ter would not have a free and unhindered opportunity 
of playing their part. To take another illustration 
from the war : if England should, by an unhappy chance, 
be invaded, our defenders would not be helped but most 
seriously interfered with if any panic arose among the 
civil population. The invasion would best be dealt with 
if the whole nation kept calm, and directed all its 
energies to devising means of routing the enemy. 
Clamor and rioting in the streets, and craven fear in our 
homes, would be a poor backing for the soldiers who 
were rushing to the breach. 

The records of the first case of a broken limb are 
lost forever, but it was pain which first taught primitive 
man the elements of a crude surgical practice. When 
some daring huntsman, in the childhood of the world, 
fell from a rock and fractured his thigh-bone, he very 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 155 

soon discovered that any movement of the affected limb 
caused him to suffer acutely. At rest, the limb was 
fairly comfortable, a fact that he no doubt communi- 
cated to his solicitous friends who crowded round him 
awestruck by the disaster that had befallen him. It 
was but a short step from this discovery to the de- 
duction that for him at least the best policy was one of 
masterly inactivity ; and we can imagine that the women 
of his tribe, then, as now, instant to relieve suffering, 
would gather brushwood, or ferns or leaves and make 
a comfortable bed for the injured limb. As the days 
passed by the healing powers of nature would assert 
themselves, and a time would come when the limb could 
be moved gently without pain, and ultimately the suf- 
ferer would discover that he could use his limb once 
more. Like Jacob, he would probably halt upon his 
thigh for all the days of his life; but in his wrestling 
with God — his combat with pain — he had discovered 
that the best treatment for a broken bone is to immo- 
bilize it. The elaboration of a general principle from 
an isolated experience was probably beyond the wit of 
primitive man, but he had won from pain the nucleus 
of a great idea, which in the evolution of the centuries 
has fructified into that huge armamentarium of splints 
and cradles and pulleys that is the stand-by of the 
modern orthopaedic surgeon. 

The existence of pain has been a goad to urge men in 
all ages to seek for anodynes with which to alleviate it, 
and now, thanks to ether and chloroform, the most 
formidable operations may be performed while the pa- 
tient is completely unconscious. The search for ano- 
dynes has been a very fruitful one, and the number of 
such remedies is year by year increasing. Some of the 
by-products derived from the distillation of coal-tar 



156 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

have been found to possess pain-subduing properties in 
a high degree. This increases still further our debt to 
the sun. 

The present war has confronted the surgeon with 
much more formidable wounds than any of which he had 
previous experience, and the change of the dressings re- 
quired by these wounds has frequently been a very dis- 
tressing experience for the unfortunate patient. But 
methods of dressing have been devised whereby the sensi- 
tive nerve-endings in the granulating flesh have been 
covered over with thin sheets of celluloid before the 
main dressings are applied; and, as a consequence, the 
patient is saved much suffering when the dressing is re- 
newed. In this fact we see an example of the pain of 
the individual bearing fruit for the benefit of others. 
The first surgeon whose heart was large enough and 
whose mind was sufficiently alert to see in the anguish 
of his patient a call for him to turn his intelligence to- 
wards devising some means of sparing pain to others in 
like case was instrumental in converting vicarious suf- 
fering into a blessing. The history of the healing art 
supplies us with many instances of the suffering of indi- 
viduals leading to discoveries rich in beneficence for the 
race. When Morton discovered the anaesthetic proper- 
ties of ether he conferred an inestimable boon upon 
humanity, and it was his recognition of the importance 
of this discovery, and his large-hearted compassion for 
the individual sufferer under the so-called " primal 
curse " which led Simpson to embark upon that course 
of perilous and self-sacrificing research which culmi- 
nated in the discovery of the anaesthetic properties of 
chloroform. 

Fain, it is therefore seen, is\ something finer than a 
form of malevolent torture. It is diagnostic, it is 
remedial, and it is frequently life-saving. It confers 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 157 

benefits upon the individual, and his sufferings, rightly 
read, may confer benefit upon a multitude. It is 
stimulative, disciplinary, and educational. The first 
child that scorched its finger in the fire has passed into 
a proverb, and so achieved immortality. In the his- 
tory of man pain has been a touchstone which has 
enabled him to tell those things that are inimical to his 
well-being, and that might destroy his life ; and through 
pain he has learned to avoid them. 

To many, the reconciliation of the idea of an omnis- 
cient, omnipotent, and just Providence with the exist- 
ence of pain seems an impossibility. They believe, 
with the old Greek philosopher, that, if there is a God 
who knows of human suffering and who cannot remove 
it, He is impotent. Or, if He knows, and can, but will 
not remove it, He is malevolent, or, what is almost as 
bad, does not care. It is an old, heart-torturing prob- 
lem, but its solution cannot be reduced to such simple 
terms. 

I am firmly convinced that, except in so far as it is 
beneficent, pain, either physical or mental, has no place 
in the scheme of things. 

We must enlarge our horizon, and look at life as a 
whole; not the little life of the individual, which is a 
transient thing, but the life of humanity, which is con- 
tinuous and of indefinite duration. That crude system 
of hedonistic philosophy which holds that pleasure is 
what gives value to life has failed because it is out of 
touch with reality. It is moral worth, moral progress, 
and, in the individual, moral character that give to life 
all that is best, and it is from the furnace of pain that 
some of those qualities have been won for mankind. 

That the Creator has not willed, out of sheer malevo- 
lence, that man or any of His creatures should suffer 
hardly requires demonstration. For if this had been 



158 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

His purpose He would have put out of human reach 
those many agents through which pain may be allevi- 
ated, and would not have permitted the curtain of a 
merciful oblivion to descend between a man and his 
most cruel pain. When pain passes the limits of 
human endurance the sufferer becomes unconscious: he 
faints. Man, looking at nature with a compassionate 
heart, but with somewhat distorted vision, is some- 
times tempted to regard it as a huge arena that is the 
scene of unmitigated and constant suffering. And he 
cannot reconcile what he regards as the cruelty of na- 
ture with the thought of God. But is nature cruel? 
The belief awaits proof. The bird or beast of prey 
kills quickly, inflicting a minimum of suffering on its 
victim. The hawk and the lion usually strike but once. 
It is only when beasts of prey degenerate in character 
from their contact with man that they absorb some 
of his cruelty. The cat playing with the mouse is an 
abnormal example of how beasts of prey treat their 
victims. The domestic cat is well fed; its hunting has 
degenerated from a noble necessity of its life into a 
pastime, and it plays with the mouse because it is 
satiated and indolent. And we are not justified in 
imagining that the mouse really suffers during the time 
that its feline captor makes sport with it. The testi- 
mony of Livingstone and others who have been mauled 
by a lion is to the opposite effect. Always, in trying 
to estimate the sufferings of the lower creatures, we 
must guard against reading into their experience those 
mental or physical pains which we imagine we should 
feel in like case. Few animals have any apprehension of 
pain, while man increases his sufferings by dreading 
them. 

The memory of the fear that has lent speed to a hare 
or a fawn pursued by dogs does not seem to be of long 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 159 

duration. A hare or a deer will stop to feed, and a 
rabbit resume its gambols on the sand in front of its 
warren very soon after the danger has passed away. 
So, neither by anticipation or through retrospection do 
the lower animals increase the volume or intensity of 
their sufferings. 

Much of human suffering is the direct result of the 
neglect to obey certain well-recognized or easily dis- 
covered natural laws. So far as one is able to observe 
it, the Universe is a great system controlled by law, 
which begets order and harmony. Even when the order 
is apparently broken by some chaotic upheaval we may 
find, if we look closely enough, that the upheaval is it- 
self only a further demonstration of law in operation. 
If we will only bear this fact in mind we shall hold a clew 
to the explanation of much human suffering brought 
upon mankind by cataclysms or disasters. 

After the great and historic earthquake at Lisbon, 
and the similar disturbances in Jamaica, at San Fran- 
cisco, and in Sicily, within the memory of the present 
generation, men bitterly questioned the beneficence of 
Providence for permitting such loss of human life, and 
such distress and pain. They could not reconcile the 
idea of a God who cared, with such happenings. But 
they failed to realize the world-order. 

The ultimate shape and form of the earth is not yet 
reached. Other mountain-peaks may yet arise from 
lowly valleys, and high hills may yet become the bed 
of unborn oceans. These cataclysmic convulsions of 
nature are as much part of the plan of the Universe in 
the making as is the life of man. But man has been en- 
dowed with reason, the gift of intelligence, the capacity 
for making observations and deducing from them some 
knowledge of the laws of nature. The knowledge of 
the laws of nature which man already possesses has en- 



160 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

abled him many times, both in an individual and com- 
munal capacity, to avoid exposing himself unpro- 
tectedly to the full violence of certain natural laws in 
operation. For instance, no modern city in England 
would consent to draw its water-supply from a sewage- 
tainted source, for the connection between impure 
water, ill-health, suffering, and possibly death is well 
established. Nor would any man wittingly build him- 
self a hut on an Alpine slope where avalanches are of 
frequent occurrence. If he did so he would have no 
just cause for upbraiding Providence for any disaster 
that might engulf him. So far as he is aware of them, 
civilized man does try to avoid coming into conflict with 
the larger laws of nature; but to expect that natural 
laws in operation, or upheavals that occur in conse- 
quence of natural laws, are to be suspended because 
man's knowledge has not yet advanced far enough to 
enable him to foretell where, when, and how every nat- 
ural law will operate, is tantamount to asking that the 
Universe should stand still till man has learned the 
whole of its mystery. 

In days before the war, which has to some extent 
given us new values and new visions, whenever the world 
was shocked by some great shipwreck, or by some 
stupendous conflagration attended with much loss of 
life, the sorrow of bereavement, and mental and physi- 
cal pain, there was always, after the first stupor had 
passed, some raising of querulous voices, which asked, 
"Is there a God: and does He care?" As in most 
popular outcries, the feeling that prompted these out- 
pourings was better than the logic behind them. To 
transfer to Providence the blame for human errors in 
judgment and in action, is to use a very weak argument 
against His immanence and beneficence. A shipwreck 
may occur because a ship was not built strongly enough 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 161 

to weather the storm — a purely human miscalcula- 
tion — or because it ran aground, or upon an un- 
chartered reef — where, again, the human factor is 
in error — or because it was caught in such a storm 
that the officer in charge could not navigate it. If we 
are going to throw back on God the responsibility for 
these disasters we must, at the same time, be prepared 
to surrender all freedom of action, and consent to be 
reduced to the level of marionettes on a string. As we 
are reasonable beings, endowed with free-will, we are at 
liberty to place ourselves in positions where we may be- 
come the victims of natural forces, or of human errors 
in judgment. But it would be absurd to expect to be 
creatures with free-will so long as our freedom of choice 
operates only along the lines of safety, and at the same 
time look to have our freedom of choice forcibly sus- 
pended, or natural laws abrogated, whenever, in its exer- 
cise, we should unwittingly stray into the danger of in- 
curring death or experiencing pain. 

In small doses, that potent poison hydrocyanic acid 
will relieve an irritable cough ; but if a patient, ignorant 
of the toxic nature of the remedy, should proceed on the 
assumption that, as a teaspoonful of a mixture con- 
taining this drug gives him a certain degree of relief, 
sixty teaspoonsful, taken at a draught, will give him 
sixty times as much relief, we should not be justified in 
expecting that, by a miraculous intervention, the drug 
will suddenly be robbed of its poisonous properties to 
protect the venturesome but unwise person from the 
consequences of his own misguided free-will. To look 
for anything of the kind would be to presuppose that 
God has nothing else to do than stand between man and 
the results that flow from his folly. But, it may be sug- 
gested, if the patient was unaware of the poisonous na- 
ture of the mixture, surely his ignorance, blossoming 



162 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

into rashness, should not lead to his undoing if God 
really cared. The answer is not far to seek. The 
knowledge that hydrocyanic acid is a poison had already 
been acquired ; that knowledge was accessible to the in- 
dividual in question; that he erred through failure to 
inquire was his own fault, and not the fault of God. 

The same line of argument may be applied to many of 
the events which have perplexed mankind. Larger, 
deeper, and better-used knowledge of natural laws, dis- 
covered or yet to be discovered, would in many a case 
have turned the sword of suffering from the bent neck 
of humanity. It is a poor appeal to make, that, until 
all the laws that govern human life have been reduced to 
writing plain enough for the blind to read, the pains 
and penalties that follow any breach of these laws 
should be suspended. Indeed, the existence of these 
penalties, the invariable linking of pain or suffering 
with a breach of these as yet undeciphered laws, is a 
goad to stimulate us to seek for the principle behind the 
process. In England great stress is laid upon the 
value of a public school education. The public schools 
of our country may not turn out many scholars, though 
it is possible for a bright and intelligent boy to pass 
through one of them and emerge with a heavy and par- 
tially assimilated load of educational lore. But in spite 
of their scholastic defects the education inculcated 
within their boundaries is the finest in the world, for 
it produces a splendid type of young manhood. To a 
very large degree this type of young manhood is the 
product of the unwritten code of laws made by the boys 
and handed on as a tradition from one generation to 
another. The laws of the Medes and Persians were un- 
alterable. Neither these laws, nor the irrefragable laws 
that rule the Universe, are so adamantine as the boy 
laws of a public school. A newcomer may have some 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 163 

knowledge of these unwritten laws inculcated into him by 
parents, by elder brothers, or by friends; but he best 
acquires a knowledge of them by breaking them unwit- 
tingly, and, though he may and probably does suffer in 
the process, it is all part of the discipline which, acting 
on his plastic character, molds it into the accepted 
type. 

In the larger school of life the same process is at 
work if we would only recognize it. 

Much of the pain in the world is attributable to man's 
misdirected ingenuity. He has always been prone to 
devise instruments of torture and methods of punish- 
ment that involve suffering. The rack, the wheel on 
which criminals were broken, the scourge, the martyr's 
pyre, the tread-mill, to say nothing of the thousand and 
one devilish devices of the Chinese torturers, were all 
man-made ; and there is little doubt that the suffering in- 
flicted by man upon man far exceeds in amount as well 
as in severity all the pain that has come to mankind 
from the operation of natural laws. As a nation we are 
accustomed to take pride in our civilization, but the 
student of our social history knows that our civiliza- 
tion was very slow to rid itself of studied cruelty. No 
one can read of the appallingly brutal punishments in- 
flicted upon our sailors a century ago, or upon the sol- 
diers who fought for us at Waterloo or in the Crimea, 
without his blood being chilled with horror. Man, who 
is sometimes tempted to think that God is malevolent, 
can be, and often has shown himself to be, more cruel 
than the arch-fiend. 

We are slow pupils, and learn the lessons that are 
prepared for us haltingly and incompletely. This is 
true of the laws of health as well as of the larger laws 
of nature. But when we have learned, and care to 
follow with scrupulous observance, the proper conduct 



164 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of life, and regulate our hours of work, our hours of 
recreation, the nature and frequency of our meals, and 
those many activities that are part and parcel of our 
daily lives, our pain or suffering will be reduced to a 
minimum. 

A difficulty that invariably confronts any one who 
directs his attention to the problem of pain is the 
suffering of little children. They are so helpless, so 
irresponsible for the ordering of their lives, and so very 
sensitive, that the pain they may be called upon to 
bear seems inexplicable on any basis of the right gov- 
ernment of the world. It is little consolation to a child 
to suggest that it is suffering in order that the sympa- 
thies of older people may be quickened. I do not put it 
forward as the supreme reason for the sufferings of the 
young, but we must realize that through the pain of 
some children the sufferings of others have been as- 
suaged. Any parent who has watched his own child 
tossing with fever-lit eyes in the throes of some painful 
and serious illness will forever after feel the claim of 
hospitals for poor children. If there had been no 
suffering among the children of the rich there would 
have been many fewer institutions for the relief of the 
pain of the poor. 

We must not forget that much of the pain of chil- 
dren is brought about by wrong methods of nurture, or 
through carelessness, stupidity, and unnecessary ex- 
posure to infection by their elders. It is the old se- 
quence once more : the broken law — the inevitable con- 
sequence. And, though it may be urged that the law 
is broken by the child's guardians, and the child suf- 
fers, while the guardian escapes, we must not forget 
that the mental pain, and the anxiety, amounting al- 
most to torture, which any one feels when a child they 
love is seriously ill redeems the suffering from being 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 165 

altogether vicarious. With our present limited knowl- 
edge the problem is insoluble, but we may rest assured 
that the pain of little children is no empty demonstra- 
tion of vindictive power, but is something with a purpose 
behind it. 

Most of the natural processes of life are unaccom- 
panied by pain. A healthy individual should be quite 
unaware of the activities of his digestive organs, the ex- 
pansion and contraction of his lungs, and the many 
other physiological activities of his economy. Pain, 
appearing as a feature of what are normal functional 
processes, is a sign that all is not well. But there is 
one great exception, so striking that, in the dawn of 
civilization, it was explained as an evidence of divine 
displeasure. Why should a mother suffer so intensely 
in the performance of what, after all, is a natural func- 
tion, the bearing of children? This is a mystery as old 
as the human race, and its answer is not an easy one. 
Maternal love is a thing deep-rooted in primitive in- 
stincts ; but there is little doubt that we hold dearest 
those things we have suffered to win, and if child-bearing 
were as simple a thing as growing flowers in a garden it 
is possible that maternal love, which is the prototype on 
earth of the high love of God, would not be an emotion 
so rich and beautiful. It receives a sacramental grace 
from suffering. 

In some women the experience of motherhood awakens 
a compassion that embraces all suffering humanity. 
Let us hear a woman speak. I quote from Robert Els- 
mere. Catherine is slowly groping her way back to 
health after the birth of her little daughter. Her hus- 
band is sitting by her in the September twilight. She 
says : " Robert, I cannot put it out of my head. I 
cannot forget it, the pain of the world! " 

" It seems," she went on, with that difficulty which a 



166 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

strong nature always feels in self -revelation, " to take 
the joy even out of our love — and the child. I feel 
ashamed that mere physical pain should have laid such 
hold on me — and yet I can't get away from it. It's 
not for myself ; " and she smiled faintly at him. " Com- 
paratively I had so little to bear ! But I know now for 
the first time what physical pain may mean — and I 
never knew before! I lie thinking, Robert, about all 
creatures in pain — workmen crushed by machinery, or 
soldiers — or poor things in hospital — above all of 
women ! Oh, when I get well, how I will take care of the 
women here! . . . Oh, to give all one is, or ever can 
be, to comforting ! And yet the great seat of it one can 
never touch. It is a nightmare — I am weak still, I 
suppose ; I don't know myself ; but I can see nothing but 
jarred, tortured creatures everywhere. All my own 
joys and comforts seem to lift me selfishly above the 
common lot." 

As with so many, her personal share in common 
suffering had taught her to see the universal need. She 
was bound more closely to her fellows in affection and 
sympathy by this common bond. She was beginning to 
interpret the eternal lesson of pain. 

But some part of the suffering of motherhood is not 
an inseparable concomitant of that natural function. 
The more artificial the life a woman leads, and the fur- 
ther she departs from nature in her manner of living, 
the more painful and perilous becomes the pilgrimage to 
the goal of her desire. It is rare for a primitive woman 
to suffer in anything like the same degree as a woman 
brought up in the hot-house atmosphere of an artificial 
civilization. For the primitive woman, too, motherhood 
has its pangs, but they are rarely intolerable ; and when 
woman discovers and practices the proper rules of life, 
the sufferings of maternity will be materially reduced. 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 167 

Pain is a consequence of the endeavor of life to adapt 
itself to its surroundings. When the adaptation is 
perfect there is no pain. This general principle is well 
exemplified in the sufferings of maternity. The child of 
highly civilized parents is likely to be born with a head 
somewhat out of proportion to the diameters of those 
bony channels through which it must pass ; and this dis- 
proportion entails longer and more intense suffering for 
the mother. So long as women are content to develop 
their brains, and leave the physical development of 
their bodies to chance, their sufferings are likely to 
continue. But, let it be set down in all gratitude to 
those who have shown us the way, the more intolerable 
pains of motherhood may be assuaged and indeed lulled 
into absolute quietness by such a drug as chloroform. 
It is not the only anodyne that may be used for this 
purpose, but probably it is the safest and best alike for 
mother and child, and it has been an inestimable boon to 
suffering womankind. 

So far I have said nothing of that other kind of suf- 
fering, as widely distributed and as poignant as physical 
pain, namely, mental anguish. Recent research has 
proved that mental pain is as real a thing as physical 
pain, for both are associated with precisely the same 
structural alterations in the cells of the cerebral cortex. 
But mental pain is a subtler thing than physical pain, 
and it may have disastrous consequences from which, as 
a rule, physical pain is free. Few cases, even of acute 
and prolonged physical pain, result in serious deteriora- 
tion of health, or end by unseating the reason. Indeed, 
it has frequently been remarked that severe neuralgia 
may continue for a long period without any marked loss 
of physical condition on the part of the patient. But 
mental pain — the agony of torn and tortured affec- 
tions, the acid-bite of remorse of conscience, the day- 



168 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

long, night-long hunger of love unrequited, the hideous 
uncertainty as to the fate of some loved one, the shat- 
tering of hopes, the blind despair of unfulfilled desire, 
the darkening of the horizon through the loss of one's 
faith — may have profound effects, and produce such 
changes in the brain that for a time the higher func- 
tions of the mind are seriously interfered with, and the 
reason reels. 

Except in such cases as its function is essentially 
diagnostic or remedial, physical pain is more beneficial 
to the community than to the sufferer ; while mental pain 
is beneficial — unless it is so severe as to upset the bal- 
ance of the mind — primarily to the individual, and 
secondarily through the effect it has upon his character, 
to those with whom he is brought into contact. Physi- 
cal pain in another stimulates the sympathy of those 
around him, and quickens their intelligence to devise 
means of alleviating his suffering or discovering means 
whereby others may be saved from a like experience. 
It acts upon the sufferer in the way of making him more 
sympathetic to others in like circumstances with him- 
self. He does not forget his own hour of trial, and, as 
George Eliot has said: " Pain must enter into its glori- 
fied life of memory before it can turn into compassion." 

Mental pain is often a secret thing. It does not 
make the same clamant appeal to those around the 
sufferer, who hides " the pageant of a bleeding heart " 
within his breast. But out of it he may win two things. 
He may either emerge from the fire warped and em- 
bittered in character; or, as more often happens, he 
comes out as pure gold. Everything in life that is 
worth possession has come to us through pain. Life 
itself was won for us through pain, and for all the 
things that hallow life men have suffered and died. 
Liberty, freedom of thought, all that is best in litera- 



MYSTERY OF PAIN AND SUFFERING 169 

ture, art, and song is stained with the blood and tears 
of souls that knew suffering, and filched from it those 
treasures they have given us to enjoy. Man's pain has 
meant his progress. Through it he has learned more 
than pleasure could ever teach him. The existence of 
suffering is a mystery, but without it earth would be a 
joyless place, and man would be without one of the 
greatest aids he has towards the perfecting of his 
character. 

In moments of depression we are apt to imagine 
that we are like the starling in The Sentimental Journey, 
whose cry " I can't get out ! " may be regarded as the 
wail of a soul that has bidden farewell to hope. But 
this is the creed of pessimism. As human beings, we 
must be prepared to shoulder our share of pain until 
perfect knowledge shall entitle us to lay it down. At 
this hour of the world's trial human pain and human 
suffering are more widespread and more urgent than 
they have ever been since the world began. All Europe 
is gripped by the hook of agony. Rachel is weeping 
for her children, and fathers who remember the glad 
and confident smile with which their boy set out to 
war are repeating in the silent chambers of their heart 
the psalmist's lament, " Would God I had died for thee : 
My son! My son!" What can it all mean? How 
can all this human suffering be transmuted into terms 
of moral value? How can it be justified? How can it 
be explained? Is there any light in the dark heart of 
the mystery? There is : and the light comes from those 
little white crosses which stand sentinel in Flanders' 
Fields above the dauntless dead. A wooden cross ! To 
each, that symbol makes its own appeal and carries its 
own message. For some it is nothing more than a 
suitable and uniform symbol for marking a soldier's 
grave. To others it means infinitely more. It com- 



170 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

memorates a victory — won through suffering and pain. 
It stands as the eternal witness to a tragedy, but it was 
no hopeless tragedy, since it bore within it the seeds of a 
Resurrection and of the grandest human hope. 

It is and was a symbol of triumph, and a perpetual 
memorial of the unity in suffering that binds God and 
His creatures together. The mystery of pain loses its 
perplexity when we remember that, though man suffers, 
God has Himself come within the orbit of a like expe- 
rience. 

" The cry of man's anguish went up unto God ; 

'Lord, take away pain — 
The shadow that darkens the world Thou hast made, 

The close coiling chain 
That strangles the heart, the burden that weighs 

On the wings that would soar. 
Lord, take away pain from the world Thou hast made, 

That it love Thee the more.' 

"Then answered the Lord to the cry of the world: 

' Shall I take away pain, 
And with it the power of the soul to endure, 

Made strong by the strain? 
Shall I take away pity, that knits heart to heart, 

And sacrifice high? 
Will ye lose all your heroes that lift from the fire 

White brows to the sky? 
Shall I take away love, that redeems with a price 

And smiles at its loss? 
Can ye spare from your lives, that would climb into Mine, 

the Christ on His Cross?'" 



CHAPTER XII 

THE DISCIPLINE OF SICKNESS 

" They also serve who only stand and wait." 

Milton. Sonnet on his Blindness. 

" And not by eastern windows only, 

"When daylight comes, comes in the light; 
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly! 
But westward, look, the land is bright." 

Arthur Hugh Clough. 

Good health is a blessing ; ill-health may be a discipline. 
Few men or women succeed in living their lives from the 
cradle to the grave without some interlude spent upon a 
sick-bed. Our infinitesimal foes, the disease-producing 
germs, lying await for us everywhere, may succeed in in- 
vading the citadel of our bodies at a moment when our 
natural defenses are weakened. Or accident may 
plunge us from the rose-flushed mountain-top of vigo- 
rous health into the abyss and darkness of many a 
month of weary, couch-chained suffering. When the 
fight with disease is at its hottest there is little oppor- 
tunity for cultivating those graces of character and 
mind that often flourish so beautifully in the atmos- 
phere of sickness and personal suffering. But when 
the battle has begun to turn, when the convalescent 
awakes each day with a renewed feeling of well-being; 
when every sense reawakens tempered to a new keenness ; 
when every little commonplace and familiar thing in the 
room is touched with a fresh light; when the perfume 
of flowers is like a eucharistic benediction, and even a 

171 



172 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

drink of cold water reveals a new, unknown, and hitherto 
unappreciated savor of pure delight, then the discipline 
of sickness has begun to blossom into beauty. 

In these days we live at such high pressure that 
nothing but the seclusion of a sick-room affords us the 
opportunity of indulging in the almost extinct habit of 
reflection. It is there that a man can turn his thoughts 
from the outside world of material things, which, after 
all, are the lesser things, and, looking into his own 
soul, see what manner of man he really is. Many a 
compass has been adjusted in the silent hours of the 
night in a darkened sick-room, and many a course has 
been charted that has made for the happiness not only 
of the individual but of humanity. It may be the 
weakness that so frequently follows an illness, or it 
may be what the mystics called the purgative effect of 
suffering, but there is something in convalescence which 
makes an individual more susceptible to finer impres- 
sions. The spiritual fire flares up when it is least 
choked by the dross of the body. We see the beacon- 
fire more clearly in the darkness than in the full moon. 
The stars are in the sky all day, but they are invisible 
to our limited vision, unless we gaze upwards from some 
dark chasm, deep as a pitshaft. 

More men than Newman have risen from a sick-bed to 
follow the gleam. That sweet and gracious personality, 
perplexed, distraught, entangled in a mesh of doubt, 
found on a sick-bed the fire of a new zeal. On his way 
home, after his journey to the Eastern Mediterranean 
with his friend Hurrell Froude, he was struck down by 
a violent fever at Leonforte in Sicily. He succeeded in 
reaching Castra Giovanni, where he was ill for nearly 
three weeks. On his recovery he set off for Palermo, 
and he tells how, " Before starting from my inn on the 
morning of May 26th or 27th I sat down on my bed and 



THE DISCIPLINE OF SICKNESS 173 
i 

began to sob bitterly. My servant, who had acted as 
my nurse, asked what ailed me. I could only answer, 
' I have a work to do for England ! ' " His sick- 
chamber had been a temple of revelation. It had been 
what the road to Damascus was to St. Paul — a meet- 
ing-place with God. 

An interesting book might be written to show how 
sickness, which has left behind it a permanent physical 
disability of some sort, has influenced the whole sub- 
sequent life of some of the world's greatest men. 
Homer, we are told, was blind. But it is unlikely that 
this blindness dated from his birth, for the exquisite 
appositeness of the descriptive terms which he applied 
to the beautiful things of nature cannot have been ac- 
quired at second-hand. The " rosy-fingered dawn," the 
" hoary sea," the " milk-white arms " of Helen, the 
" ox-eyes " of Athene, and all the natural beauties of 
the Isle of Calypso, so perfectly depicted, must have 
been visual memories, stored up, loved, and recalled with 
a kind of holy joy from the hidden recesses of the mind 
of one whom sickness or accident had made blind. Such 
things were not imagined ; they must have been seen, and 
seen by him who first wove them into the fabric of his 
.spoken verse — and seen again in the atmosphere of 
imagination with the clarified vision of one for whom 
physical sight was only a memory. 

John Calvin, one of the profoundest thinkers and 
most voluminous writers that ever lived, had his out- 
look on life much influenced by all that he suffered in 
his body. He was a martyr to gout, he suffered also 
from stone and from biliary colic, he had frequent at- 
tacks of asthma and eczema, and there is little doubt 
that his whole theological outlook was tinctured by the 
influence of his ill-health. It tended to make him de- 
spondent. For many generations Calvin's theology 



174 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

completely dominated Protestantism. Until recently it 
held almost undisputed sway in the religious life of Scot- 
land, Wales, the evangelical section of the Church of 
England, the north of Ireland, Holland, and North 
America. It was founded largely upon the Pauline 
Epistles, but in his interpretations of the teachings of 
St. Paul he went farther than his master. It is hardly 
to be wondered at that a man who was called upon to 
suffer such constant and intolerable anguish in his frail 
body should have come to throw more emphasis on the 
juridical aspect of the divine character than on the 
divine love. 

There is little doubt that if Calvin's health had been 
better his outlook on life and his interpretations of the 
decrees of God would have been brighter. One is 
shocked to think of the age-long mental suffering that 
Calvin's doctrines of Predestination and Election 
riveted upon the minds of the religious who were brought 
up in the atmosphere of his theology. 

Sir Walter Scott was lame, an attack of illness when 
he was a child, barely two years old, leaving him with a 
permanently weak ankle. The literature of high 
romance owes more than is generally known to that at- 
tack of infantile paralysis. When all the vaunted sur- 
gical and medical skill of Edinburgh could do no more 
for the child he was sent to Sandyknowe, his grand- 
father's farm, in the hope that the purer air of the 
country might accomplish what science knew not how 
to do. 

Nature failed to restore the withered limb. The 
child, however, improved greatly in health. But for 
that stricken limb it is almost certain that Scott would 
have become a soldier, and have fought under Welling- 
ton in the Napoleonic wars, when a bullet or a saber- 
stroke might have put an end to his career before he 



THE DISCIPLINE OF SICKNESS 175 

had written a line. But his infantile illness did more 
for literature than merely to save Scott from the 
hazards of war. 

His grandfather's shepherd, Sandy Ormiston, de- 
veloped a strong affection for the delicate child, and 
used to carry him out on to the hills and lay him on his 
plaid on a sunny slope, where he would lie by the hour 
with the sheep and the lambs cropping the scanty grass 
round his resting-place. As he lay there this gentle 
shepherd would croon to him snatches of old Scotch 
songs, and tell him fragments of oft-told Border tales. 

And in his poetry, his novels, and his Tales of a 
Grandfather, Scott in after-years was simply giving 
back to the world the ripened fruit that had sprung 
from the seeds sown in his receptive and fertile mind by 
the discerning love of this worthy old shepherd. Scott 
himself never forgot this indebtedness, and pays a 
tribute to it in Marmion : 

" Thus while I ape the measures wild 
Of tales that charmed me as a child, 
Rude though they be, still with the chime 
Return the thoughts of early time: 
And feelings, roused in life's first day, 
Glow in the line, and prompt the lay; 
Then rise those crags, that mountain tower 
Which charm'd my fancy's wakening hour." 

The subject is one that might with advantage be pur- 
sued further; but not in this place. 

There are certain characters which are not improved 
by the discipline of sickness, but under it become queru- 
lous, self-centered, and morose. Always some porcelain 
cracks in the furnace. But such people are in a mi- 
nority, and very few come out of the sick-room with 
their outlook on life completely unaltered. A man who 
has never been ill before and who is suddenly caught 
in the toils tends at first to resent this forcible inter- 



176 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ruption of his activities ; but gradually he learns to be 
patient, and his heart is touched with a new sympathy 
for others less fortunate than himself to whose lot more 
sickness falls. The understanding begotten of personal 
experience quickens his mind to pity. The appeal of 
weakness and helplessness is to him ever afterwards 
clamant and insistent. He can no longer shut his ears 
and harden his heart. He, too, has tasted of the waters 
of Marah, and found them bitter. 

But, however much may be gained by the sufferer 
from the discipline of a single illness, it is in the gray 
ranks of that large fraternity who are the victims of 
chronic or incurable ailments that we best see how 
good may come of evil. There can be few things harder 
to bear than the dawning knowledge coming to a man or 
woman in the mid-time of their activities that, for them, 
participation in the battle of life is over, and that hence- 
forth they can be nothing more than spectators. When 
the first storm of rebellion has died down in their hearts 
they discover that, though they are withdrawn from the 
general fray, they have a battle all their own to fight. 
And it is a battle that requires patience as well as forti- 
tude — high spirit and self-sacrifice. 

The world heaps its honors and rewards, and rightly, 
upon some of those who, amid the clang of arms and 
the roar of guns, do deeds of superb heroism. But 
there are no rewards, except the love and admiration of 
their friends, for those who fight a stern battle with 
themselves in the arena of their sick-room; and the 
heroism needed to brace a man for this silent conflict is 
often greater than that demanded on the battle-field. 
At first there may be a tendency to self-pity, but by and 
by this pity dissolves into a wider compassion that en- 
compasses all suffering folk. At first the spirit chafes 
against the enforced inaction of the body and its sepa- 



THE DISCIPLINE OF SICKNESS 177 

ration from so many of the things in which it took 
delight. But soon new avenues of enjoyment open be- 
fore the wondering eyes, and the impotent man discovers 
that the world in which he had lived was only a small 
corner of the Universe — all of which is ready to 
minister to his solace. Through his window, in the dark 
and sleepless nights, he can catch glimpses of the stars 
— those eternal, silent witnesses of man's battle upon 
the earth. He can watch the diamonded belt of Orion ; 
see fresh beauties in every wreath of cloud-wrack driven 
across the sky ; watch, night by night, expectantly, the 
moon grow from a silver sickle to a great and brilliant 
orb, and find, as many a skin-clad shepherd in Palestine 
found in the childhood of the world, " The heavens de- 
clare the glory of God." 

Then little simple things come to him with a fresh ap- 
peal. He watches the birds ; they may become to him, 
as to St. Francis, his little brothers. He looks eagerly 
to see the first wave of cherry-blossom break in spray 
upon the branches, and, having found it, he will point 
it out delightedly to his next visitor. And when nature 
fails him he can turn to the world of books. He reads 
old favorites over again with a new zest, and finds in 
them subtle beauties hitherto undiscovered. That old 
ode of Horace, that poem of Browning, that novel of 
Scott, that essay of Ruskin, that letter of Stevenson, all 
glow with a fresh allurement ; he never found such treas- 
ure in them before. And then there are the visits of 
his friends, each bringing his little trophy of news from 
the market-place — his little shred of kindly gossip — 
his good story, his helpful handgrip. Somehow all has 
changed. There are delights in life he had never 
dreamed of — joys, whose full savor he had never be- 
fore tasted. And yet nothing has changed but the man 
himself : for, as Thackeray said, " The world is a look- 



178 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ing-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection 
of his own face." 

So, out of the turmoil and fret of his soul, there 
springs a great contentment, and the courage to look 
with brave and undaunted eyes forward along the road 
of life. 

One sometimes hears it said of this or that doctor 
that he carries into a sick-room a message of good 
cheer and hope, and it is given to some men to radiate 
from their personality an influence which sometimes 
does more good to the patient than the prescription — 
of doubtful Latinity — that they leave behind them. 
But we rarely hear of the influence of the patient upon 
the physician. Yet there are few who will deny that they 
have sometimes brought more out of a sick-room than 
they ever took into it. It is a sanctuary wherein they 
have communed with a great soul, they have been il- 
lumined by some of its radiance, they have caught a 
glimpse of " the light that never was on sea or land." 

There are some sick-rooms that should always be en- 
tered with feet unshod. 

That suffering can teach lessons in high altruism is 
obvious from the records of many a casualty clearing 
station at no great distance behind the front line. It 
is there that the terribly wounded first have the oppor- 
tunity of receiving adequate surgical aid; and it is 
there that many a man has had the opportunity, and 
leaped to meet it, of putting into practice one lesson 
his own sickness had taught him — the lesson of divine 
compassion. Sometimes when a patient reaches one of 
these stations he has lost so much blood that there is 
barely enough in his body to keep the vital spark aflame. 
In such a case it is the custom to perform an operation 
called transfusion, and to introduce into his almost 
empty vessels a quantity of fresh blood from another in- 



THE DISCIPLINE OF SICKNESS 179 

dividual. Sometimes a nurse or a doctor is the giver 
of blood ; but more often, when the call for a volunteer 
is made, another soldier, now convalescent from his in- 
juries, willingly makes the sacrifice. It is not a spe- 
cially dangerous thing to do, nor is it, as the Army reck- 
ons things, a great thing to do ; but it has in it the ele- 
ments of nobility, and it is part of the nobility stamped 
upon the common clay of humanity by the discipline of 
sickness, and the lesson of compassion for all in like 
case learned by one who himself has known weakness 
almost unto death. The spirit of Sir Philip Sidney is 
not yet dead. You may find it in a lad from the slums. 

In the aftermath of war we shall have to reckon with 
a harvest gathered by the sick and wounded from the 
discipline of their pain. That the discipline has 
wrought and is working its effects is sufficiently appar- 
ent to any one with the eyes to see who has been priv- 
ileged, in however small a way, to minister to these 
stricken men. 

It is unfortunate that none of those statesmen whose 
policy sometimes precipitates war, and who hold in 
their hands the destinies of nations and the lives of men, 
ever visit the wards of a war hospital at night. When 
they do come, they make their visits by day, and, as a 
rule, see things under exceptional and to some extent 
artificial circumstances. They see the wounded and 
sick smiling, cheerful, and happy. Their one desire, 
according to the press correspondent who expands upon 
the visit and, incidentally, upon the glories of war and 
the heroism of the men, is to get well, in order to have 
another shot at the enemy. Other things besides gun- 
positions may be camouflaged. But let them come at 
night, unexpectedly and unannounced, and by the light 
of a hurricane lamp carried by the sister — for, thank 
God, the lady with the lamp is still walking through the 



180 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

aisles of pain — pass quietly from bed to bed. Some 
of the men are asleep. Others are awake, staring with 
open eyes at the bellying roof of the tent above them. 
Sometimes they cannot sleep for pain. That can be 
alleviated. Sometimes, if you ask them, they will say 
that they are all right, and are only thinking. These 
eager, wakeful, watching eyes haunt one. What are 
they thinking of? I fancy I know. Are they thinking 
of death? Not once in a thousand cases. They have 
looked that grim monarch in the face without flinching ; 
they have companied with him in the trenches, and have 
ceased to fear him. Are they thinking of their loved 
ones ? Yes : very often, and very tenderly. But most 
frequently, I believe, the burden of their thoughts is the 
appalling hideousness of war. Through their wounds 
or their sickness they have escaped for a time from the 
hell in which they had been living; but the memory of 
it — its sordidness, its grossness, its brutality — is still 
quivering in their minds. They rarely speak of things, 
but they often recall them; they cannot blot them out 
of their memory, and the thoughts persist in coming 
back in the still watches. 

While they were living through their experiences they 
had not the time to reflect. But now they have time 
and opportunity, and thought will have its way. 

And who are these men? Not uneducated and un- 
cultured denizens of the slums, but the pick and flower 
of British manhood, representatives of every creed and 
of all classes. The son of the landed proprietor may be 
in the next bed to the clerk from the city bank; the 
university graduate is side by side with the porter from 
the warehouse; the poet and visionary is a near neigh- 
bor to the casual laborer; and all, each according to the 
measure of his capacity, is thinking, thinking, thinking, 
and storing up his conclusions to be the fount of ac- 



THE DISCIPLINE OF SICKNESS 181 

tion some day in the future. They have seen, they 
know, they remember the utter hideousness of war, and 
they recognize its criminal stupidity, its insensate blind- 
ness. They recall how, before the cataclysm, the dem- 
agogue from his cheap platform, the brilliant journalist 
in his leading articles, aye, even the preacher in his 
pulpit, could dilate upon the glories of war; how war 
was a test of endurance, a toughener of moral fiber, a 
school for heroes, a nursery of self-sacrifice — as 
though these graces of character could not be engen- 
dered, could not flourish in some more gentle atmos- 
phere ! 

They are weighing the good against the evil. They 
are seeing the shattered homes in Flanders and on the 
plains of Northern Italy ; the pathetic, hopeless retreat 
of old men and women whose little cottages are in ruins ; 
they are hearing the cries of ravished women and the 
forlorn wail of lost and terrified little children. They 
are remembering the blood and filth, the death, the 
mutilation, the irreparable destruction of useful human 
lives ; men blinded, men driven mad, men blown to pieces, 
men maimed for all the rest of their days. And when, 
in the dead of night, the stretcher-bearers quietly enter 
the ward, and from a bed, hidden by the kindly shelter 
of two screens, lift a lifeless burden — somebody's boy, 
some woman's loved one — and, covering it reverently 
with the flag, bear it silently down the alley-way and 
through the canvas door, they turn their sleepless heads 
upon their pillows, and in their hearts salute the un- 
dying dead. The balance moves, and the scale on the 
side of evil touches the ground. 

These silent, sleepless, thinking men are the bloodless 
revolutionaries of to-morrow. It is they who will, 
when the war is over, establish permanent peace upon 
the earth. They will see to it that never again in their 



182 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

time or the time of their children's children shall inter- 
national quarrels be put to the harsh arbitrament of the 
sword. It is good to defend a righteous cause, and to 
die for the right, if need be ; but it ought to be made an 
impossibility for any autocrat, or any blood-intoxicated 
nation, sedulously to plot such evil that innocent men 
must die to reestablish right. Tyrannies and despot- 
isms must cease ; and in days to come these wakeful, si- 
lent thinkers will be the chief agents in bringing about 
those larger conceptions of humanity and international 
brotherhood that will make war an impossibility. 
They will be coadjutors with God in winning out of ca- 
tastrophe the fruits of moral order and moral progress. 



CHAPTER XIII 



LOVE AND MARRIAGE 



" ' Guess now who holds thee ? ' — ' Death,' I said, but there 
The silver answer rang — ' Not Death, but Love.' " 

E. B. Browning. Sonnets from the Portuguese. 

" The soul's armor is never well set to the heart unless a 
woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she braces it 
loosely that the honor of manhood fails." 

Rtjskin. Sesame and Lilies. 

Let it be said at once, and frankly — the basis of all 

love between a man and a woman is, unless it be filial 

or parental love, sex-instinct. Fortunately, however, 

though it is imbedded in this elementary instinct, the 

passion may be so sublimed by imagination, and by the 

atmosphere of romance and idealism which it engenders, 

that its sexual origin is lost sight of. It may be, and 

often is, the motive power which lifts a man or a woman 

from baseness to nobility. It is one of the mightiest 

forces in molding character, and without it, and all that 

it connotes, society would tend to crash headlong into 

anarchy. Under heaven there is nothing holier or 

higher than true human love. It illumines the darkest 

corners of life, and transmutes the commonplace into 

the divine. 

There is a fundamental difference between the love of 

a man and the love of a woman. In nature the male 

is the aggressor, ready to fight and vanquish all rivals. 

Among primitive men, before civilization had fashioned 

their conduct, the same principle held good, and a man 

fought for or stole his bride. 

183 



184 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

The mollifying influence of time and culture has made 
it unnecessary, except among savage peoples, to have 
recourse to such brutal expedients ; but, in the way of 
love, a man still shows evidences of traits derived from 
a long-forgotten and vanished ancestry. Under the in- 
fluence of the subtle passion his personality becomes 
more dominant. He lives on the tip-toe of his being. 
His finer qualities surge up from hidden depths. His 
mind is quickened. Consciously or unconsciously he 
seeks to make a good impression on the object of his 
love. He is seized by an intense desire so to impress his 
personality upon her mind that she may think of no 
one but himself. He can brook no rival. This is the 
feverish stage of love in which his remote ancestor, 
primitive man, would have sharpened his arrows. His 
modern successor instead takes to writing verses. 
Later, when he finds that his overtures are not altogether 
unacceptable, he develops other traits. He begins to 
deny himself — to think out little artifices of kindness 
that may give pleasure to the woman he loves. He fore- 
sees and forestalls her wishes. He tries to alter his 
habits of life in accordance with her desires, expressed 
or only guessed at. And all the while he is tortured by 
a longing to possess her ; to merge his life with hers, to 
have a common existence. 

By tradition and upbringing the love that first 
dawns in a young woman's heart is a thing to be kept 
secret. She must not be so unmaidenly as to seek her 
loved one. She must wait until he declares himself; 
whereon hangs one of the great tragedies of the life of 
womankind. But there are ways and means, and love 
is a clever preceptor. At first she tends to become re- 
served and somewhat self-centered. She is, through 
atavism, the bride to be, waiting for the result of the 
conflict of which she is at once the prize and the spec- 



LOVE AND MARRIAGE 185 

tator. She nurses her secret thought in her heart, un- 
til gradually it asserts itself and vibrates through all 
her being. Her eyes gleam with a new light. There 
is a fresh spring in her step, and if she finds — as 
lovers can — that she is loved by the man she adores, 
she enters upon a new cycle of life. Her whole world 
assumes a new value. She lives in an atmosphere of 
dreams. She is uplifted with a great pride, shot 
through with a tender humility, that this miracle of 
love should have come to her. She is possessed by the 
image of her beloved. The tones of his voice, his every 
gesture — the visual memory of his features, his per- 
sonality fills her mind and there is no room for another. 
She clothes her lover with lofty attributes, and it is 
perhaps well for man that every woman in love is an 
idealist, for she sees him not as he really is, a very or- 
dinary human creature, at the best made of common 
clay, but as something a " little lower than the angels," 
made beautiful in body and soul by her imagination. 

Now that woman has received her emancipation, and 
has been made a participator in many of those activities 
of life that were too long regarded as the prerogative 
by divine right of man, there is less of the old atavistic 
relation in the matter of love, of aggressive, combative, 
and conquering male, and shrinking, captive woman. 
A woman now meets her lover on more equal terms. He 
is no longer the potential houselord, and she the sub- 
servient kneader of dough. Only a weak man, uncer- 
tain of his own authority, wishes to dominate woman. 
Only a soul-less woman places herself under the heel of a 
man. Men and women of character respect each other, 
and respect is no hinderer of love. Nowadays a man 
and woman meet as two human beings, complementary 
to each other, neither of whom can without the other 
fulfill their destiny. But romance is not yet dead, and 



186 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

love still rules and guides their hearts to seek each 
other. And, having found each other, a man and 
woman in love are seized with a great desire ; — a long- 
ing for the permanent continuance of the wonderful 
passion that has already drawn them together. They 
hunger for the blending of their individual lives into a 
common whole ; they long for the opportunity of shar- 
ing together whatever of good or ill life may have to 
offer; they are consumed by a desire to be mutually 
helpful to each other — he to shelter her, she to succor 
and solace him when the storms of life buffet him. 
For, though it is rooted in sex-instinct, love is a thing 
of high moral value, and teaches lessons of loyalty, of 
self-sacrifice, and of spiritual fellowship. Where it 
does not kindle such aspirations it is not the divine 
flame, but some rushlight imitation which soon dies 
down. But where it is the fire from heaven it burns 
through all obstacles, and cannot be beaten back until 
love consummates itself in union. 

The happiest marriages are those in which there is 
a slight temperamental difference between the contract- 
ing parties, but a strong community of interest. The 
difference in temperament should not be great enough 
to be capable of growing into an antagonism, and the 
community of interest should be one in which there is 
no identity of achievement, or overlapping of talent, 
but rather a complementary contribution from the one 
to the other to make a perfect whole. For an ideal 
marriage a spiritual affinity is a primary necessity; 
and that wedded life may be a success a large under- 
standing and an immeasurable sympathy are indispen- 
sable. The absence of these qualities in a man or 
woman who have pledged their troth to each other may 
lead to disaster. The first year of married life is prob- 



LOVE AND MARRIAGE 187 

ably the most difficult. It is like a mine-strewn sea that 
requires skillful navigation. 

The first shock of wonder at an unexpected revela- 
tion of character may lead to a pitiful estrangement, 
unless love is ever ready to forgive. 

At first, in a happy marriage, the lovers are all in all 
to each other. Their happiness is complete in itself. 
Their joy is a golden chalice filled with rich wine which 
they drink together. They live in two worlds : one 
in which other people are permitted to exist, and the 
other, a little hallowed sanctuary of their own, where 
none but they can enter. 

But gradually, when the fiercer glow of passion has 
died down into a steady fire, they begin to recognize 
that love has large responsibilities. They discover that 
their common life, which they have looked upon as such 
a perfect thing, is capable of even loftier perfection. 
A little dream hand knocks at the door of the woman's 
heart. It is the hour of her annunciation — it is the 
moment for which the great Giver of Life has prepared 
her, fashioned her as a woman, and dowered her with 
those qualities of mind and body that attract love, and 
which have won her a mate. The sex-instinct becomes 
the mother-instinct, and she is consumed with a great 
desire to bear a child. This is to be the pledge and 
token of her love for her husband ; something very pre- 
cious, the possession of neither, yet belonging to them 
both. 

The mother-instinct is one of the most beautiful at- 
tributes of a woman's character. It is the possession 
of all normally constituted women, though in many 
cases, except in so far as it exhibits itself in solicitude 
for her husband, it may lie dormant for a long period 
after marriage. Behind everything, even though a 



188 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

woman may be perfectly unconscious of it, it is the 
spiritually directed motive force that has caused her 
to love. Though it is latent in all women, it is in some 
keenly alive from the time they grow to maturity. 
Such women often choose a mate not because they are 
carried off their feet by love for him, but because chey 
recognize that a husband is an unfortunate necessity to 
enable them to realize their desires. They are, all the 
while, looking beyond him to their unborn children. 
The marriage of a man and woman where this ambition 
has been the alluring force upon her side is quite capable 
of being, and frequently continues to be, a very happy 
one. For many a man and woman have been drawn 
closely together, even when they were beginning to drift 
apart, by the all-compelling strength of a little child — 
infinitely weak, but invincibly strong. 

Purely from the biological point of view, the goal of 
love and the aim of marriage is the production of chil- 
dren. But, rightly interpreted, the purpose cannot 
be narrowed into such straitened limits. The begetting 
of children entails other obligations, both to the chil- 
dren and to society. It is the duty of parents to feed, 
clothe, protect, educate, guide, and instruct their 
children alike by example and precept in such a way 
that they may be able to rise to the full heritage of their 
humanity, and take their part as thinking, capable and 
reasonable beings in the material and mental life of the 
world. A recognition of these facts is the basis of that 
social and religious institution, the family. Certain 
people, who desire to put into practice the principles of 
a selfish individualism, hold that marriage should be 
nothing more than a matter of mutual consent between 
the contracting parties, in which everything is to be sub- 
ordinated to the pleasure or convenience of themselves ; 
the union to be broken at will, when the fires of the pas- 



LOVE AND MARRIAGE 189 

sion they wrongly call love have burned down. Such 
a system is anti-social, and is based upon a narrow ego- 
ism. To put it into practice would be to degrade hu- 
man love from a high sacrament to the relations of the 
beasts in a stable. 

Wholesome family life is a buttress of social morality, 
and it is well that the appealing helplessness of a child 
at birth, which unlike so many other young animals, can 
take no care of itself for many months, makes an irre- 
sistible claim on the affection of both its parents. 

The love they had for each other assumes a deeper 
quality, and is enriched by this new possession in which 
their affections meet and blend. If there were no 
love of parents for their children, and they neither 
trained them in the kindly atmosphere of the family, 
or, through the aid of other people better versed in the 
education of the young, but cast them out at the earliest 
possible moment to fend for themselves, each child would 
be compelled to fight its own battle with nature — to 
live through once more, the conflicts of primitive man, 
denied all access to the accumulated experience of the 
centuries — driven to climb, with bleeding feet, a few 
steps up the hill of progress, and baffled, fall back again. 
As we have already seen, man is distinguished from the 
lower animals by the power of making use of the knowl- 
edge gathered by his ancestors. That is one of the 
secrets of his progress, and parental love and the in- 
stitution of family life ensure that every child born with 
intelligence shall have the opportunity of benefiting by 
this great heritage. 

As life moves on, and other children come, the par- 
ents find each succeeding child a fresh stimulus to their 
mutual affection. They may be unable to catch again 
the glorious rapture that came to them with their first- 
born, but the memory of it stirs within them. Love 



190 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

has lost its passion ; that fine flame dies down ultimately, 
when nature has no longer need of it, but its place is 
taken by a sense of loyal and dependent companionship, 
colored by affection, which lasts till death breaks the 
union, and which may, indeed, overstep the grave. As 
they grow older the love of a man and a woman takes 
on a new quality, and in the case of a woman, if she is a 
mother, partly changes its direction. Her affection for 
her husband tends to sink a little into the background, 
though it is ready to leap forward again in the hour of 
his need. A great share of her love is now concentrated 
upon her children. They are his as well as hers, and 
in turning the full blaze of her affection upon 
them she is unaware that he is now relegated to a sub- 
ordinate place. She sees him through them. If the 
matter were submitted to her she would probably deny 
it with passion and surprise, but the fact is obvious to 
any careful observer of human nature. 

The goal of love is the continuation of the race. 
That is the end toward which all human passion was 
intended to move. It is only when man blinds himself 
to the elementary fact that the consummation of love 
is divorced from its legitimate purposes, and made to 
minister to selfish enjoyment. It is a wonderful pro- 
vision that the strongest passion that humanity pos- 
sesses, through which and by which men and women 
are called upon to fulfill their destiny and hand on the 
torch of life which has been passed down to them 
through countless generations, should be associated with 
all the loftiest attributes of mind and all the finer qual- 
ities of emotion. It is thus hedged about in order that 
its appeal may be universal; that it may not fail of 
fulfillment alike among those in whom the carnal appe- 
tites are strong, and those of finer fiber in whom the 
psychic qualities of love burn with a white flame which 



LOVE AND MARRIAGE 191 

blinds them to that other side that otherwise might repel 
them. 

So far we have dealt only with love that has found 
its fulfillment in union. We must, however, recognize 
that there are lovers of both sexes to whom, for one rea- 
son or another, that consummation is denied. Death 
may have intervened, or some other insuperable obstacle 
may have made marriage an impossibility. It is remark- 
able that, though more male than female children are 
born, by the time adolescence is reached the disparity is 
on the other side and there are more women than men. 
It is within the bounds of possibility for every man to 
find a mate ; but this happiness is denied to many million 
women, unless they are prepared to share the affection 
of the same man with some other woman. Polygamy 
may offer a solution among the semi-civilized, but it will 
never appeal to an educated and refined woman. 

The disparity in the relative proportion of the sexes, 
which has always existed, will be sharply accentuated 
by the war, which has destroyed so many of our finest 
young men. And it is a pathetic fact, though only a 
small part of the harvest of suffering which the war 
has brought to women, that a large number of the girls 
of this generation, well qualified by health, by charac- 
ter, and by instinct to be the mothers of men, will for- 
ever be denied that ineffable joy. I never see a little 
wooden cross, with its simple inscription, and its heart- 
piercing " aged 22 " without wondering whether be- 
neath it lies a face that to some solitary, heart-broken 
girl was the face of an angel. 

Love unfulfilled, or love incapable of fulfillment, be- 
comes love repressed; and love repressed may have 
strange consequences. In the case of a man love re- 
pressed may endure for a long time until the obstacles 
that hindered its fulfillment can be overcome, and love 



192 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

can have its way. But more often it fails to stand the 
corroding test of time, and declines until it becomes 
nothing more to him than a pleasant memory to be 
turned over in his mind now and then, and dismissed with 
a shrug of the shoulders. It does not usually produce 
any change in his character except, perhaps, to make 
him cynical. But, in a woman, love repressed or denied 
the opportunity of fulfilling itself may have a profound 
effect upon her character. 

It may cause her to throw her energies into a cru- 
sade; to become the champion of the rights of her sex, 
and to direct her physical and mental energies into well- 
intentioned channels, sometimes with misguided zeal. It 
must be a matter of satisfaction to all right-thinking 
men that woman has now got the vote. She has earned 
that privilege nobly. But every physician knows that, 
to some extent, the rabble of riotous women, clamoring 
for their rights, which a few years ago made our city 
streets the by-word and laughing-stock of Europe was 
recruited from women suffering under the disparity in 
the relative proportion of the sexes, and the consequent 
repression of that sex-instinct which underlies human 
love. And I have sometimes thought that the wild dis- 
plays of unwomanly violence, which stalwart policemen 
could not control, would have died down at the touch of 
the clinging arms of a little child, or the pressure of an 
infant's warm lips upon the breast. 

Be that as it may, the problem of the woman doomed 
to an obligatory spinsterhood is likely to occupy con- 
siderable attention after the war. Many of these 
women, as they have done in times past, will spend them- 
selves nobly in the service of others, and will find in the 
care and love they can lavish upon sick and crippled 
children in hospitals, homes, and institutions an outlet 
for the divine mother-feeling that, under happier cir- 



LOVE AND MARRIAGE 193 

cumstances, they would pour out upon their own little 
ones. Others will find occupation in the arena of bus- 
iness life. The war has opened up many avenues filled 
with new activities for women, and in these channels 
they will expend the energies that otherwise might have 
been employed in the rearing of a family. Some anaemic 
shadow of the love they could have bestowed upon a 
husband they will devote to their work ; but even the 
most prosaic among them will sometimes think of what 
might have been, and occasionally turn over the fra- 
grant rose-leaves of old memories with a sigh that 
woman's crown of glory has been denied them. 

The opinion has been advanced — not boldly and 
openly as yet, though that may come — that it should 
be regarded as the inalienable right of every woman, 
married or unmarried, to have one child of her own. 
This is a plausible but most dangerous doctrine. It 
is dangerous because it fails to recognize the rights of 
the unborn child. The law might be persuaded to re- 
move its " birth's invidious bar," but the child would 
be denied what it has the moral right to have, the sacred 
influence of family life and the possession of two recog- 
nized parents equally responsible for its upbringing and 
guidance. 

If such a proposal is ever made seriously, and is re- 
garded as coming within the sphere of practical politics, 
it will be met with fierce opposition. The strongest op- 
position will come, not from men, but from women, mar- 
ried and unmarried. By instinct and heredity women 
are idealists. They are ruled by the " emotion of the 
ideal." Their social instinct is a surer and a higher 
thing than man's. The mother-heart in them teaches 
them to look rather to the welfare of the race than to 
their own individual happiness. 

With vision alert and clear they would see the worm 



194 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

in the fruit, and would scornfully reject this proffered 
boon if it meant that their child was to be denied the 
privileges and amenities of a home such as children born 
in wedlock would enjoy. The home is the nursery of 
moral worth, and a perfect home implies the cooperation 
of two parents. Woman would see, with her marvelous 
intuitive gift, that this social experiment would, in its 
ultimate issue, be anti-social, and, as always, she would 
decide to sacrifice herself, and her innate desire for 
motherhood, rather than let the race suffer. It is to 
woman that we owe the institution of the family. On 
foundations laid by her the whole superstructure of so- 
cial life has been established. She saw the vision, and 
toiled to make her vision a reality. Not lightly will 
she raise an impious and destructive hand to tear down 
the fabric she has striven to build, and has consecrated 
with her suffering and tears. 

Love is of God. It softens the asperities of life; it 
makes life possible, and ensures its continuance and pro- 
tection. And though it is, at bottom, intimately 
though unrecognizedly bound up with a selfish desire 
for the physical continuance of one's own being, it is 
the attribute of life which makes the greatest demand 
upon the spirit of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation. It 
is like a lily in the marsh. Its roots are in the mire, its 
pure face is turned up to heaven. The great Architect 
of the Universe might have chosen some other means 
than the fruition of love to ensure the continuance of 
human life upon the earth. But so it has been decreed ; 
and we frail creatures of the dust have reason to be 
thankful that the mystery of life is so bound up with 
the high sacrament of love. 



CHAPTER XIV 

WORK 

" Man hath his daily work of body or mind 
Appointed, which declares his dignity, 
And the regard of Heaven on all his ways; 
While other animals inactive range." 

Milton. Paradise Lost. 

Man is by nature a creature of inertia, but of necessity 
an energetic animal — he works. There are advocates 
of the mechanical theory of life who regard the human 
body as nothing more than a great and complex power- 
station for the conversion of one form of energy into 
another, and for its direction into new channels. Just 
as a fire cannot burn without fuel, which it reduces to 
smoke, ashes and heat, so no muscle can contract, no 
limb move, no organ of the body discharge its function 
without the coincident destruction of some portion of 
organic material. 

In its destruction this organic material is reduced 
from complex to simpler forms, and in its descent lib- 
erates the energy which was potential within it. In 
order that the equilibrium of the organism may be pre- 
served, the material reserve of this potential energy 
must be restored. It is made up by food, by water, and 
from the oxygen of the air. Before these constituents 
can be built up into the reserve-stuff of energy they 
must undergo modifications in the digestive and circu- 
latory systems. When properly modified they are in- 
corporated in the reserve-stuff of the organ which needs 

them, be it liver, or heart, or muscle. They become an 

195 



196 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

integral part of the living tissue through which ulti- 
mately their energy will express itself. The potential 
chemical energy in the reserve-stuff of the tissues may 
differ remarkably from that contained in the original 
food-stuff. This building up and storing of reserves 
of energy was called by Claude Bernard " Synthetic 
Organization." 

" The organizing synthesis," he says, " remains in- 
ternal, silent, hidden in its phenomenal expression,' 
gathering noiselessly together the materials which will 
be expended." 

The wonderful cycle of phenomena in the genesis of 
clouds and the fall of rain is a matter of common knowl- 
edge. The sequence has already been described in these 
pages : from sea to cloud ; from cloud through dew or 
rain back to the sea once more. But there is another 
succession of phenomena equally wonderful, but much 
less known, in which the sun also plays the master part. 
The plant kingdom is the great builder up of energy, 
which is liberated in the form of work by the members 
of the animal kingdom. Through the magic influence 
of the sun the chlorophyll of plants can break up the 
carbonic-acid present in the atmosphere, and store up 
the carbon in their tissues. They can convert the inor- 
ganic into the organic. No animal is able to do this, 
and in this respect a man is less highly endowed than a 
blade of grass. Without the vegetable kingdom animal 
life would be impossible. All animals, man included, 
feed directly or indirectly upon the carbon-containing 
compounds elaborated by the plant kingdom under the 
influence of the sun. And it is through the animal king- 
dom that the energy derived from the sun, and stored up 
by the vegetable kingdom, is returned again to the cos- 
mos. Part of the energy is given back in the heat gen- 
erated by bodily activity; part is consumed in work 



WORK 197 

done. All work done can be expressed in terms of mo- 
tion ; heat is nothing more than a mode of motion ; and 
we must not forget that solar energy comes to us as an 
undulatory motion in the ether. These facts, which 
have been determined scientifically, demonstrate the in- 
timate harmony and inter-dependence that exist be- 
tween the different parts of the Universe. When we re- 
member that only an infinitesimal fraction of the total 
energy of the sun reaches our earth — the actual figure 
is %o7065000oth part of its light and heat — we may 
well wonder what undiscovered potentialities lie hidden 
in the remainder; and we can understand that it is no 
mere empty superstition which has made some men, in 
all ages, worship the sun as the giver of life. 

The elementary needs of man were probably the first 
motives that drove him to work. These elementary 
needs are still clamant, and with some men are the 
sole impulses that drive them to exert themselves. Man 
early discovered that food for himself and his depend- 
ents, clothing to protect them from the changes of the 
weather, and a roof of some sort to cover them, could 
only be secured by work. When man first appeared up- 
on the earth it is probable that he found ample food 
within easy reach. But later, as the number of men 
upon the earth increased, the available supplies of food 
would become less easy of access, and man would become 
a hunter. Hunting, which is now a sport, was in those 
days a form of labor, but withal a form of labor ren- 
dered attractive by the element of hazard it contained. 
From the beginning man has been a tiller of the ground. 
He would soon discover that, by cultivation, he could in- 
crease the available quantity of the fruits of the earth. 
Probably, at quite an early stage in his existence, he 
took steps to grow in a little allotment which he staked 



198 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

out round his dwelling those plants and herbs which he 
had discovered would sustain him. So, by laboring he 
lessened his labors. He no longer needed to forage far 
afield for vegetable food. With a little prescient work 
he could make it spring up at his own door. In exhibit- 
ing this quality of careful prevision man distinguishes 
himself from other animals. We have already seen that 
certain members of the animal kingdom lay up stores 
of food, but no animal other than man by labor pre- 
pares the ground, transfers to that ground plants or 
seeds which he may have found at a distance, and tends, 
by watering and dressing, his young crops, and waits for 
the fruits of his labor to supply him with nourishment. 
Such work displays intelligence. Bees and squirrels are 
food-hoarders by instinct, which is just a habit re- 
peated through a long series of generations until it be- 
comes transmitted by heredity. Man is a cultivator 
of the ground, a laborer on the earth, and a hoarder 
of food, because his intelligence gives him prevision. 

The second demand that drove man to labor was the 
need of a covering to protect himself. Less well fur- 
nished with a hairy covering than his nearest animal 
relatives, he would be more likely to suffer inconvenience 
from changes of weather. Leaves and skins fastened 
loosely round him were probably his earliest protection, 
and then on a wonderful day either he or the woman 
who was his mate invented a needle. Probably it was 
nothing more than a sharpened piece of bone, such as 
the Esquimaux use to-day, with which he could pierce 
the skins and lace them together with strands of vege- 
table or animal fiber. No animal lower in the scale 
than man has ever invented a tool so simple. Yet what 
simple instrument is so pregnant with possibilities as the 
needle? The first sharpened piece of bone driven 
through a hide by a primitive cave-dweller made pos- 



WORK 199 

sible the evolution of the whole world of dress, and 
laid the foundations of the Rue de la Paix. 

The first men probably sheltered in caves of the earth, 
either found naturally, or excavated artificially by the 
labor of their hands. The next stage in the evolution 
of a dwelling-place was probably the tent, extemporized 
by stretching between the branches of a tree skins from 
animals killed in the day's chase by some hunter who, 
in the pursuit of his quarry, had wandered far afield 
from his cave and been overtaken by a storm. In proc- 
ess of time the tent, an easily transportable form of 
dwelling, would give place to a more elaborate structure 
of earth and wood and stone, gathered together with 
much effort, and erected with much thought and toil. 
This was the prototype of the modern dwelling. 

At every stage man has made use of the accumulated 
experience derived from his own earlier endeavors and 
failures, or from those of others, to improve the work 
of his hands. In this he shows how the possession of 
intelligence, memory, and the power to design a plan 
and to work up to it place him head and shoulders in 
the field of labor above all other animals. 

The birds, the bees, the mole, the beaver, are all older 
creatures than man. Yet, so far as is known every 
bird builds precisely the same kind of nest as its an- 
cestors did at the beginning — or, if there are any 
changes, they are infinitesimal; the bee still constructs 
the same shape of cell ; the mole is content with the gal- 
lery that satisfied his forefathers a million years ago, 
and the beaver has invented no tool to make his wood- 
cutting easier, and still builds the same kind of dam as 
his primeval forebears. But man is never content with 
the result of his work. He is ever eager to improve 
upon it; to discover new methods of performing it; to 
invent instruments and tools which will facilitate it. 



200 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

These things he does because his labor is guilded by in- 
telligence, and not by instinct. He has this great ad- 
vantage over the lower creatures : his predecessors have 
put on record, at first by oral tradition, and later in 
writing, the means they employed to achieve certain 
ends, and these records are available for his study and 
instruction. 

Were it not so, every man would, so far as his labor 
is concerned, be compelled to begin his struggle with 
the forces of nature at a point somewhat antecedent to 
the stone age, and start discovering everything for him- 
self again. 

It is a paradox that man, through his labor and in- 
ventiveness, has retarded in some measure the progress 
of his own evolution. The human hand is a very won- 
derful instrument, capable of remarkable adaptations, 
and of the finest coordinated movements, as is demon- 
strated by any skillful violinist or pianist. But man 
has hindered the further evolution of the powers of his 
hands by inventing tools and machinery. In the same 
way he has hindered or interfered with the higher evo- 
lution of the eye by the invention of magnifying glasses 
and the microscope. He has also limited, except in the 
case of a few trained athletes who have specially devel- 
oped their powers of locomotion, his speed of move- 
ment by making use of animals such as the horse, or ma- 
chines such as the bicycle, the train, and the motor-car, 
to convey him from place to place ; and by the building 
of boats he has limited his capacity as a swimmer. 
Thus, by the use of his intelligence, and the products 
of his inventiveness and toil he has unwittingly put a 
brake upon his own physical evolution ; but in doing so 
he has achieved what would have been impossible for 
him, however highly his structural and functional evo- 
lution might have progressed. 



WORK 201 

Once man had succeeded in supplying his primitive 
needs for food, shelter, and clothing, he advanced a 
stage, and became more or less of a specialist. As com- 
munities grew, certain duties would be delegated to cer- 
tain individuals. The hewers of wood and drawers of 
water, the cultivators of the soil, and the house-builders 
would be recruited from among those of the tribe to 
whom the hazardous adventures of the chase made no 
appeal. And from these small beginnings there grad- 
ually grew up our present system whereby a workman 
chooses his occupation or his trade and devotes his ac- 
tivity to that, and to that alone. 

When we analyze the work which engages so much 
of human activities, and push our inquiries down to root- 
principles, we discover that an enormous proportion of 
it consists of little more than the removal of matter from 
one part of the earth's surface, and its transference to 
another. In the process it may be subjected to the op- 
erations of intelligence, as when cotton grown in South 
America is brought to Lancashire, and woven into fab- 
rics. But in all work, in which our physical rather 
than our mental functions play the chief part, we are 
little more than hod-carriers. But when we consider 
the arts we find that in his work man may become a 
creator. He hews a piece of marble into a beautiful 
statue, and thereby expresses an idea ; or with brush and 
colors he paints a vision of his dreams. Or he erects 
a beautiful building, so exquisitely designed, so well- 
proportioned, and so perfect in every detail that it is 
a palace of art. This is creative work ; and we find the 
same germ of creative activity in every newly-invented 
machine. So that though man's work begins on the 
level of the beasts of burden, it ends somewhere in the 
skies. 

Man and society are so constituted that work is a 



202 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

duty. It is a duty which man owes to himself and to 
humanity. To himself because happiness lies in the 
line of congenial work, and to humanity because it is 
incumbent upon every one to contribute something to 
the common welfare, and not to be a parasite. 

This is an ugly word, and may have a sinister mean- 
ing. It has been applied by red-hot would-be dema- 
gogues to all who do not work with their hands. Such 
orators usually harangue their audiences with their 
own hands concealed behind their backs. 

But the designation of work cannot legitimately be 
restricted to manual labor alone. The man who works 
with his brain is not a parasite, nor is the capitalist who 
imagines and plans and sinks his wealth in some great 
enterprise in which the actual labor is performed by 
other hands than his own. Parasites on human society 
are not many ; and they are to be pitied, for they never 
know the joy of work. 

A congenial occupation, in which a man has scope for 
the exhibition and development of his own character is, 
however hard the actual work may be, capable of af- 
fording him the highest pleasure. But the work must 
be suited to his capacity and such as he can take a pride 
in. The tilling of the ground is among the humblest, 
as it is the most ancient, of occupations. But what joy 
can be extracted from it by all who love a garden ! It 
is a lesson in the infinite and soulful possibilities of the 
lowly task, to be shown round his garden by a gardener 
who loves every inch of soil in it; who knows the poten- 
tialities of that corner for the growth of roses ; of that 
patch of light and sandy soil for his geraniums ; and of 
that furrow for his potatoes. Such a man takes a 
pride in his task; he extracts joy from it; he ceases to 
be a laborer and becomes an artist, for love sanctifies 
and ennobles lowly things. 



WORK 203 

Any one who is unfortunate enough to be chained to 
an uncongenial occupation is to be pitied. If he has no 
love for the work he is engaged upon it becomes an in- 
tolerable burden, and, having become a burden, it tends 
to react upon his character, and make him slack, inat- 
tentive and careless. Occasionally he may extract some 
satisfaction from his unloved task if, by chance, one 
day he has performed it well. For all work, if done 
well, may produce a feeling akin to joy in the doer of it. 

This is a truism which every school-boy can confirm. 
The biographies of eminent men afford us many exam- 
ples of the torture of the uncongenial task. One need 
only recall Burns, and his work as a revenue officer. 
His soul was sometimes in the skies with the singing 
birds, while his nose and eyes were hunting for smuggled 
brandy and illicit stills. He was a great lyric poet; 
but, because he hated the task, a very indifferent gauger. 
The psychical distaste to an uncongenial task may react 
physiologically, and it has been proved by experi- 
mental observation that the same person will perform 
a greater amount of work in a given time when oc- 
cupied on a task which may not necessarily be easy, 
but which is attractive, than upon a task of a similar 
kind for which he has no liking. Work unloved becomes 
drudgery, and drudgery is the task of slaves. 

On physiological grounds it is necessary that periods 
of work should be interrupted by periods of repose. 
Even machinery, capable as it is of being driven at 
full pressure almost indefinitely until it wears out, 
runs better and lasts longer if it is granted occasional 
seasons of rest. And though the human mechanism is 
capable of carrying on its work in an emergency for a 
time much greater than usual, a point comes at which, 
through exhaustion, the tired body is unable to continue 
discharging energy any longer. The reserve-stuff of 



204 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

energy is almost all used up ; the muscles, and brain, and 
circulating blood are engorged with poisonous by-prod- 
ucts, produced in the body by the consumption of the 
reserve-stuff, and until rest, and sleep, and food can be 
obtained, the body refuses to do any more work. Dur- 
ing rest and sleep the poisonous by-products are col- 
lected and eliminated through various channels ; and 
food supplies the organism with potential energy which, 
after digestion and assimilation, is stored up as chem- 
ical energy ready at need to be converted once more 
into work. 

Long before the extreme stage of exhaustion above 
described is reached, fatigue of a lesser degree has ex- 
isted. Before exhaustion is great enough to be actually 
felt by the worker it is sufficiently advanced to interfere 
with his work. Careful experiments have been carried 
out which serve to demonstrate this. It has been found 
for instance, that a worker engaged on a purely me- 
chanical and frequently repeated operation can turn 
out a certain number of complete articles, in, let us say, 
a period of two consecutive hours ; but if, at the end of 
forty-five minutes, he is allowed a rest of a quarter of 
an hour, he will turn out a larger number of the com- 
pleted articles in the second forty-five minutes than he 
did in the second hour, and this, although at the end 
of the two consecutive hours of work he was unaware of 
any sensation of fatigue. 

It is therefore evident that fatigue is an insidious 
thing, and begins much earlier than its sensation ap- 
pears. But it may be recovered from rapidly if suit- 
able periods of rest are allowed. In many of our mu- 
nition factories careful studies are being made regard- 
ing work and fatigue, and when the observations are 
duly collated and examined it will be possible to make 
large deductions, of wide practical import, which, if ap- 



WORK 205 

plied, will make for a revolution in labor conditions, and 
for the increased efficiency and happiness of the workers. 
There is a very fine adjustment between the nervous sys- 
tem and the muscular system. It is something more 
than a mere " afferent stimulus — efferent impulse " se- 
quence. There is a psychic element, as that command- 
ing officer well knew who got the last ounce of effort out 
of his wearied soldiers by means of a tin whistle. Men 
or women who sing at their work usually increase rather 
than diminish their activity, for emotion or memory 
stirred by song brings the higher psychic realm into 
more intimate touch with the lower psychic realm, and 
together they hasten the discharge of nervous energy 
to the expectant muscles. 

It is frequently said that change of occupation is 
rest. The aphorism embodies only a half-truth. Like 
all general statements of the kind, it requires some qual- 
ification. If carried too far it may prove to be a dan- 
gerous doctrine. It will at once be understood that 
to change from one form of activity to another, in 
which the same group of muscles is involved, is not rest. 
A soldier, who is fatigued by trench-digging, would not 
look upon a change of occupation, to the somewhat 
lighter task of a route-march, as much relaxation. 
Nor would it be, as many of the muscles called into play 
are the same. But a complete change of activity, a 
change, let us say, from the use of the muscles to the 
work of the brain, is a rest of a kind. 

When Mr. Gladstone turned, as was his wont, from 
the political conflicts in which he was embroiled, to writ- 
ing articles on theological subjects, or to the study of 
Homer, he was indulging in a change of occupation. 
But he was using much the same faculties in both pur- 
suits. When, however, he abandoned his study for the 
woods and took to felling trees he was giving his in- 



206 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

tellect a complete rest. But, whatever his occupation, 
he was using up some of the " reserve-stuff " of energy, 
and in doing so was producing in his system toxic by- 
products, the smoke and ashes of all work, which re- 
quired to be eliminated from the system. So that 
though one set of organs might be given a rest by his 
employment of another set, those organs of the body 
which have to do with elimination were kept working 
at high pressure all the while. In the course of their 
functional activity these organs also use up the reserve- 
stuff of energy, and consume nervous energy as well, so 
it is obvious that there are better ways of resting than 
to change the kind or direction of one's activities. 

Every man should have a hobby, and his hobby should 
be chosen with care. It should, as far as possible, be 
some form of activity separated by a wide gap from 
his ordinary occupation. For instance, a clergyman 
should not choose reading as his hobby; he would be 
better occupied with golf. That a hobby may be of 
greatest value to its devotee it should take him into a 
new atmosphere, mental, and, if possible, physical as 
well. It should never exhaust him, nor should it be 
such as will deflect all his love from his ordinary work. 
Rather should it send him back to his daily occupation 
with faculties brightened, enthusiasm kindled, and his 
whole being refreshed. If it does none of these things 
a hobby becomes a hindrance instead of a help, and 
should be given up. 

" The dignity of labor " is a catch-word that is fre- 
quently employed, and the phrase embodies a great 
truth which has not yet adequately been appreciated. 
For what is labor? It is the expenditure of energy. 
We have already seen that all the energy incorporated 
in the living organism is derived from the sun. The 
plant gathers it — the animal kingdom expends it'. 



WORK 207 

To man is given the right and the power of spending 
what portion of this wealth comes to him, with in- 
telligence. Through him it returns to the cosmos. 
It is therefore his duty to guard against degrading this 
energy, or dissipating it too prodigally upon unworthy 
ends. Some degradation and some dissipation of en- 
ergy it is impossible to avoid ; but if man will only real- 
ize that in using energy, which he cannot create, he is 
holding a trust for the Universe, his work, whatever it 
may be, will assume a dignity that it lacked before. 
Looked at in this way, which is physically and physi- 
ologically the right way, the humblest task is clothed 
with new responsibilities. It becomes part of the great 
world-order, and honest work is sacrosanct. 

This conception of work entails a readjustment of 
values. We come to recognize that the clergyman, the 
teacher, the writer, the poet, the man of law, and the 
physician are in a true sense as much laborers as the 
man who earns his living with pick and shovel. The 
clergyman, the teacher, the writer, and the poet each 
in his own way repays the world-order for his con- 
sumption of energy by his loyalty to the ideal. The 
loftier the ideals proclaimed to the world the more 
earnest becomes the purpose of those who mold their 
lives by them, and no man of serious purpose willingly 
shirks his task. Ideals make for the genuineness of 
work, and genuine work economizes the stores of cosmic 
energy. 

The physician, by his work, justifies his consumption 
of world-energy by protecting and saving the lives of 
others, by making them efficient, by teaching them the 
way of health — and the healthiest man does the best 
work. The man of law makes conditions of work pos- 
sible. So it is seen that all humanity is bound up in a 
great confederation of energy-users, engaged in the 



208 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

common task of spending to the best advantage the 
wealth of solar power they have indirectly acquired from 
the giver of light. Take the laborer, the man at the 
bottom of the pyramid, out of it, and the structure col- 
lapses. Take out any body of men from the higher 
levels, and the efficiency of the others suffers. All are 
co-partners in a sacred trust. 

If life did not offer the opportunity of work it would 
lose half its charm. Men would soon grow tired of sit- 
ting with folded hands, and the world would become 
a place of misery. 

For work is a great source of happiness, and the 
bringer of measureless solace to mankind. The condi- 
tions of it occasionally give rise to sharp dissatisfaction, 
but congenial work done honestly and to the best of 
one's ability makes for contentment. And though a 
restless ambition is a great asset, a contented mind is 
immeasurable wealth. This is one of the rewards of 
him who works. Its price is above rubies, and it can- 
not be purchased with gold. All work has the power 
of bringing contentment to man ; some work brings him 
joy. Work through which he can express his spirit 
is creative, and in so far as a man feels that he is, in 
the discharge of his task, a co-worker with the Infinite, 
he tastes of the cup of joy. 

He is a poor creature whose only aim in work is his 
own sustenance and comfort, or the accumulation of 
wealth. He is false to the world-trust in which he 
shares. His work is worthiest who consciously or un- 
consciously does service to humanity, be he drain-layer, 
navvy, or lawgiver. The service of humanity should 
be the goal of all work. The civilization to which we 
are heirs is the fruit of age-long effort and much labor 
consecrated to lofty ideals. It is our duty to improve 
that heritage for those who are to follow us ; to leave the 



WORK 209 

world a healthier, happier, cleaner, and more wholesome 
place than we found it — a place in which life will have 
fewer asperities and ampler opportunities. These 
things may be accomplished by work, if the aim of the 
worker is high. 

Happy is the man who comes to his task each morn- 
ing with a singing heart, and who has learned that the 
humblest worker becomes a mighty craftsman when his 
soul speaks through his labor. The honesty of work- 
manship is an acid-test of character. Alone, amid the 
eternal flux of things, the honest work endures ; and if 
man had no other immortality to look to he might find 
one along the line of his daily duties. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE REVELATION OF GOD TO MAN : RELIGION 

" There is nothing on earth that does not show either the wretch- 
edness of man, or the mercy of God; either the weakness of man 
without God, or the strength of man with God." 

Blaise Pascal. Pensees. 

" All tended to mankind, 
And, man produced, all has its end thus far: 
But in completed man begins anew 
A tendency to God." 

Browning. Paracelsus. 

Life without labor and without love would be incom- 
plete; without religion it would be hopeless and des- 
olate. Professor Drummond used to say that the spe- 
cial charm of Millet's picture " The Angelus " consisted 
in its combination and representation of these three 
attributes of human life : love, the man and the woman ; 
labor, the hoe, the barrow, and the cultivated earth ; and 
religion, the distant village spire, and the attitude of 
devotion of the figures, called into the presence of the 
Eternal by the sound of the evening bell. Together 
these things give life beauty, purpose, and solemnity. 
Rob life of one of them, and it suffers ; rob it of all, and 
it becomes a pitiable derelict. 

Religion is that part of a man's mental life which 
tries to envisage God, which stimulates him to seek to 
know the Power that rules the Universe, and to recog- 
nize therein a Spirit to whom he owes fealty and affec- 
tion, and a Father whom he may dare to trust, to wor- 

210 



RELIGION 211 

ship and to love. But a properly balanced religion 
should have another side: it should embrace both God 
and man. 

A man's faith should teach him to love his fellowmen, 
and to have confidence in the future of humanity. Re- 
ligion is the atmosphere of the soul, and the benevolent 
mother of character. 

For some people the practice of their religion is 
nothing more than the punctilious observance of a code 
of good manners. To them duty is an obligation only 
in so far as it is socially expedient, and ideals mean no 
more than the society ambitions of their set. They 
have never felt the flame of a God-directed aspiration 
burn within them. A social faux pas troubles them 
more than a breach of the moral law, and the dread of 
social ostracism is more to them than the fear of eternal 
punishment. 

Religion being the tie which binds man to the Highest, 
or the atmosphere of the soul within which he seeks to 
worship God, it is right that we should inquire how he 
first acquired his conception of the divine and became 
a theist. The mystery was revealed to him progres- 
sively, and at first along three natural channels. God 
is invariably Self-consistent, and made use of secondary 
channels for this revelation as for all other manifesta- 
tions of His power. He chose to speak through the 
voices of Nature ; to make use of man's affections, oper- 
ating through his love and veneration for his dead ; to 
sanctify conscience, converting it from a rudimentary 
tribal instinct into His witness in the soul. 

Man had within him a capacity for understanding, 
and Nature spoke her message into his astonished ear. 
The whisper of the wind in the dark and forlorn aisles 
of the forest, the uncanny earth-voices audible in lonely 
places, the roar and thunder of the sea, the cataclysms 



212 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of Nature, the earthquake, the lightning and the thun- 
der spoke with an awe-inspiring message to man. 
These things must be the manifestations of some Power 
mightier than himself; there must be invisible creatures 
— gods ; spirits of evil power, spirits possibly beneficent. 
Some may be inclined to doubt that any revelation came 
through this lowly channel, but who among us has not 
heard the voice of Nature, which is a tone of the voice 
of God, speaking to us in the beauty of flowers, the 
lonely grandeur of mountain peaks, or the wizard music 
of the sea? We correct our impressions by the expe- 
rience won from the fuller revelation in our souls. The 
primitive savage was not ready for that larger revela- 
tion, and did not fully understand, so the phenomena 
which should have taught him to love and worship 
taught him to fear as well. We cannot lightly dismiss 
the fact that in all ages the message of Nature has won 
its way into the heart of man. The philosophers, the 
theologians, the poets, and the artists consciously and 
unconsciously have interpreted that message as the voice 
of God. From the prophet Job and the psalmist David 
down to the present day men have recognized in the 
voices and beauty of Nature a witness to the Highest, 
and there are few to whom its appeal has not come with 
an insistent force, that was something more awe-com- 
pelling than mere emotion stirred by hearing or sight. 
More than any modern poet Wordsworth had a soul at- 
tuned to catch the whisper and the message of Nature's 
God-revealing harmonies. Who cannot say with 

him? — 

" I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 



RELIGION 213 

A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
And mountains; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth; of all the mighty world 
Of eye and ear, — both what they half create 
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize 
In nature, and the language of the sense, 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being." 

Another line along which revelation came was man's 
veneration for his dead. As early as the neolithic age 
he had begun to conclude that death did not mean an- 
nihilation, but that man after death went on to another 
existence where he had need of some of the things that 
had served him on earth. So there arose the custom 
of burying with the dead food for his journey into the 
land of the Immortals, and weapons and other objects 
which might be of use to him there. This was a long 
step forward, for the belief had in it the nucleus of all 
subsequent faith in the destiny of man; and under the 
influence of the teaching of Christ there evolved from 
this elementary conception the confident assurance that 
the souls of the righteous go home to God. 

The third agent in this slowly unfolding revelation 
was conscience. Of recent years an attempt has been 
made to reduce conscience from its long-recognized po- 
sition as the voice of the Universal Father within the 
heart of man, to a mere herd instinct or clan spirit. 
Possibly it may have arisen in some such form of loyalty. 
A man's conscience blamed him when he was guilty of 
any act that might work disaster upon or be prejudicial 
to a member of his own tribe, or approve of his action 
when he had done something from which the tribe or clan 
might derive advantage. But any one who reads his- 
tory aright, and observes not only the social but moral 



214 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

development of a people, must admit that the primitive 
characteristics or faculties of a people are capable of 
being sublimed into something much loftier than the 
elementary attributes from which they originated. 
Among civilized people the narrow clan spirit or tribal 
instinct has long ago died down. In one direction its 
place is taken by patriotism, which is a clan spirit that 
embraces one's own country. In another direction its 
place is taken by conscience — which no one would con- 
fuse with patriotism, as it operates in a field into which 
patriotism rarely obtrudes except in time of war. 

Nowadays the promptings of conscience are no 
longer an atavistic trait, but the response of all that 
is best in man to the voice of the Eternal. What man 
is there who has not experienced the remorse of con- 
science? — and, knowing it, does not recognize in it 
something infinitely higher and more soul-searching than 
mere regret for disloyalty to his herd? 

It is a matter of interest to note how Nature, which, 
as we have seen, is one of the agents of revelation, coop- 
erates with and reinforces conscience, another agent. 

The poets have emphasized this over and over again: 



and: 



The thief doth fear each bush an officer " ; 

" When the deed was done 
I heard among the solitary hills 
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds 
Of undistinguishable motion, steps 
Almost as silent as the turf they trod." 

This is the eternal story : the forces of Nature are used 
to drive home a moral lesson. 

Along these three channels, therefore, there came to 
man some revelation of God. He was unable to grasp 
the whole truth and his feet were prone to err, so that 
he wandered into the by-paths of superstition and su- 



RELIGION £15 

perstitious practice. In this he was aided by the thau- 
maturgists, or wonder-workers — men a little cleverer 
and a little less scrupulous than their fellows, who saw 
in man's gropings after God nothing of nobility, but 
simply an opportunity to establish their own prestige 
and give them ascendancy over their dupes. But, in 
spite of all human distortions and all human accretions 
fastened upon it, the stream of revelation held on its 
way. 

The Jewish race has always been famous for its in- 
tellectual gifts, for its imagination, its intuition, and 
its receptivity. It has a peculiar genius for religion, 
so it is little to be wondered at that it first intercepted 
the full stream of the revelation and recognized it for 
what it was. It proclaimed with no uncertain voice 
that there is one God, and one God only. It brooked no 
minor deities. This unique people, gifted with extraor- 
dinary spiritual insight, had among it certain men of 
richer intellect and higher spirituality who were ab- 
solutely convinced that through the voices of Nature 
and in the secret chambers of their hearts they heard 
the voice of God speaking to them. They did not hes- 
itate to declare their message, attributing it definitely 
to its source with the words, " And the Lord said " : 
They were men attuned to the Infinite. A piano-wire 
tuned to the note of " C in alt," or to any other note, 
and stretched across a room, will vibrate in harmony 
when that note is struck upon a piano ; and the mind 
of man in tune with the Divine Mind, will catch the 
whispers of God's voice to which other men are deaf. 

Among the Jews, for the first time in human history, 
morality and religion were definitely linked together. 
In this, Judaism presents a most striking contrast to 
the pagan religions of ancient Greece and Rome. The 
Greeks and Romans were polytheists ; their numerous 



216 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

gods and goddesses were superhuman creatures with hu- 
man passions and lusts abnormally exaggerated. They 
were gods without morals as we understand the term, 
and as a consequence the religion of their followers, ex- 
cept in a few cases, was completely divorced from mor- 
ality. It is strange that a people so highly cultured 
as the ancient Greeks could have taken a delight in and 
worshiped such gods. But with some, like Socrates 
and Plato, the religion they practiced was infinitely 
higher than the gods they worshiped; and once and 
again a sculptor with a vision of the divine would try 
to capture his dream and imprison it in marble or in 
bronze, and in Greek art, Greek sculpture, Greek poetry, 
and Greek philosophy, rather than in Grecian mythol- 
ogy, we catch a glimpse of God. 

Revelation was progressive, but it was infinitely slow ; 
so slow that even a child might follow it. But even 
then, man with his inborn capacity for error was per- 
petually wandering off, as he still continues to do, into 
bypaths of unbelief. It is a proof of the confidence of 
the Eternal in His revelation that He chose to make it 
through natural channels rather than by the super- 
normal. He knew that men would come to the truth in 
time. He had endowed them with intelligence, the 
weapon which had helped them to establish their ascen- 
dancy in the animal world, and He was prepared to 
wait till, through the proper exercise of that gift in the 
interpretation of the evidence afforded them, they 
should at last grasp the secret. He knew His crea- 
tures ; knew how they would err and stumble, but knew 
also that only that is immeasurably precious to man 
which he has won by struggle. 

The consummation of the revelation to man came in 
the person of Jesus Christ. In Him we find at their 
loftiest and best all the highest qualities of humanity, 



RELIGION 217 

with none of the degrading elements of evil that are 
a part of the personality of ordinary men. He showed 
to what a height of perfection human nature might be 
raised. He was possessed of a dauntless courage, which 
faltered only once, and then but for a moment. His 
soul was aflame with a white-hot anger against evil 
wherever found ; but this was tempered by a large char- 
ity that proceeded from a divine understanding and 
an infinite power of compassion. 

He went about doing good ; lived an absolutely blame- 
less life ; was able to resist the most subtle temptations ; 
was betrayed by one of His disciples; was shamefully 
put to death by the Romans at the instigation of the 
Jews ; was laid in the tomb, and rose on the third day 
from the dead, and ascended, as " the beloved physi- 
cian," St. Luke, has put on record, from the summit of 
the Mount of Olives in a cloud into the infinite expanse 
of the heavens. He was born of a simple Syrian maid 
— the wife of a village carpenter ; He claimed to be the 
Son of God. 

Such, in briefest outline, is the story of the most 
remarkable Personality the world has ever known. The 
tale is so wonderful, and the mysteries associated with 
it are so great, that in all ages there have been men 
who have not hesitated to affirm that the whole thing 
is a myth ; or that, if there ever was a man called Jesus, 
He was nothing more than a simple village lad suffering 
from delusions of grandeur. 

A myth ! An idle tradition ! A delusion ! No myth 
or delusion ever bore such rare fruit; no idle tradition 
was ever pregnant with such enduring realities. If 
the story were not true, or the claim a lie, it would long 
ago have been cast into the rubbish-heap, and have 
ceased to influence the lives of men. But to-day, after 
the lapse of nineteen hundred years, the influence of 



218 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Christ and His teachings is infinitely greater than it 
was at the time of His crucifixion. 

He made no attempt to establish a kingdom by might. 
All He left to the world were a handful of simple doc- 
trines ; a little collection of parables ; a few beatitudes, 
praising meekness, compassion, purity, and the peaceful 
spirit, promising comfort to the mourner, and offering 
hope to those ambitious for the good and the right; a 
simple but sacramental love-feast, and the priceless ex- 
ample of an immaculate life. He was poor; of lowly 
circumstances ; no seeker after power ; with no reputa- 
tion in His life-time that extended beyond the confines 
of a little corner of Palestine ; but He has conquered the 
world. 

In their day and generation Alexander the Great, 
Julius Cassar, and Napoleon Bonaparte were men of wide 
renown — conquerors who, by the might of the sword, 
trampled nations underfoot. To their contemporaries 
they must have seemed individuals of tremendous impor- 
tance. But what influence has any one of them had 
upon the lives of the generation now living? In the 
eternal scale of truth it could be counter-balanced by 
a hair. But the life of this obscure and " deluded " 
Nazarene has altered the whole of history. It has 
done infinitely more than that : it has leavened all human 
thought, permeated all literature, all philosophy, all 
poetry, and touched with the beauty of holiness innum- 
erable human lives, which, but for their devotion to His 
person, and their conformity to His example, would have 
been sordid and worthless. It has been the fount of 
all the loftiest ideals, and the source of an irrefragable 
hope. Such things do not flow from myths; they are 
the offspring of inscrutable mysteries. 

One of the most remarkable features of Christianity 
is that it creates an atmosphere which influences even 



RELIGION 219 

those who profess no allegiance to the person of Christ. 
Every hospital in England, and every institution for the 
help of the distressed, is a perpetual witness to this 
fact. 

Many philanthropists who make no profession of 
Christianity imagine that their charity is a product 
of civilized humanitarianism. But unconsciously they 
have been quickened to pity for their fellowmen by the 
spirit of social service which was first taught by Christ. 
Nowadays we hear much of the social gospel and the 
gospel of humanity. These are, in their way, excellent 
things; but they owe all that is in them of nobility 
and any gospel they embody to the life and work of the 
Crucified. He was the first socialist, and the first pos- 
itivist. He taught the equality of man, and showed the 
heights to which human nature could be sublimed. 

There is much in the life of Christ and His Death 
and Resurrection that is enveloped in mystery. But 
these are the mysteries of faith, and as we are ready to 
accept in the ordinary walks of existence so much that 
we can neither understand nor explain — such, for ex- 
ample, as the miracle of our own conscious life — it is 
illogical to reject, or shrink from accepting, because 
of their incomprehensibility, mysteries which have pro- 
duced results so real and tangible. No ardent and 
practiced climber would think much of a mountain which 
did not present him with some difficult crags to scale, 
and some deep and abysmal crevasses to bridge before 
he could stand in amazed and ravished wonder on its 
summit. So it would seem that the enigmas of the 
Christian religion are set there to test our courage and 
our faith, and to make of life no colorless and unin- 
spiring ramble along a level road, but a high and soul- 
testing adventure. 

To be of service to a man his religion should be one 



220 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

to which his intellect can give assent. This does not 
necessarily exclude that mystical quality without which 
no religion can exist, but it keeps it from drifting into 
superstition and superstitious practice. Nor does it 
exclude the miraculous. A miracle is something, sur- 
passing reason, which happens or is wrought in ap- 
parent opposition to the recognized laws of Nature. 
We must recognize that the so-called laws of Nature are 
the lines along which God usually acts. The Maker 
of the law can suspend the operation of the law, and 
so work a miracle. It is sometimes said that the age of 
miracles is past. This may be so if we confine the 
miraculous to phenomena that are purely physical; 
but miracles are still being wrought daily in the secrecy 
of human hearts. 

None but a bigot will deny that religion is a far big- 
ger thing than churches and creeds. Most Churches 
lay claim to a special vested interest in God. How the 
Infinite must laugh at the arrogance and effrontery of 
His children ! Some people imagine, indeed they have 
been taught, that He can best be worshiped within the 
confines of some building specially consecrated for the 
purpose. It is meet and orderly that there should be 
such places for worship — Christ Himself worshiped 
in the Temple — but God does not necessarily dwell 
there, and He may be approached and found quite as 
readily under the great vault of the open sky. More 
men have come face to face with God in the silent clois- 
ters of their own hearts than ever found Him beneath 
the stone arches of a Gothic cathedral. That a beau- 
tiful Gothic cathedral may stir the emotions must be ad- 
mitted; but such stirring of the emotions ought not to 
be interpreted either as religion or worship. It may 
serve as an acolyte for both. 

Such buildings, with beautiful music and the rare 



RELIGION 221 

light filtering through stained glass, create an atmos- 
phere; and for some people a proper atmosphere is a 
necessary concomitant of the act of worship. 

Creeds and dogmas are a necessary part of religion ; 
but we cannot lock the Infinite within the chambers of 
any creed, however comprehensive. Still, a creed is a 
necessity to prevent belief trickling away into the 
morass of loose thinking. Dogmas serve the same pur- 
pose. Many of them undergo modification in process 
of time. Only those endure which embody an element 
of hope ; the rest tend to slip into desuetude and decay. 

The religion practiced by a majority of our soldiers 
is one in which dogma has little place. They have a 
simple, rough-hewn creed of their own, which has not 
3^et been reduced to the cold phraseology of written lan- 
guage. There are many exceptions, but for most 
soldiers religion consists in doing the straight thing, in 
never going back on a pal, in being a " white man " 
ready to deny and sacrifice oneself, even lay down one's 
life, for another, with no special thought of God at all. 
And yet, to limit their religion to these simple but 
heroic practices is to do them an injustice. Though 
they may not recognize it, and may not be prepared to 
acknowledge it, all this self-abnegation and lofty altru- 
ism is a ray caught from the cross. 

Religion is not something to be clutched at with de- 
spairing hands, like a piece of flotsam, when the waters 
of affliction tend to overwhelm one, but an attitude of 
mind, an orientation of soul to be cultivated sedulously 
so that a man may walk with unbowed head through all 
the storms of life stayed by a glad confidence in the 
eternal justice and enduring love of God. Rightly 
practiced, religion is one of the chief factors in moral 
development, and without morality social progress be- 
comes an impossibility. It acts upon moral develop- 



222 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ment from without by establishing a standard of con- 
duct that makes for good ; but its chief effects flow from 
its leavening influence within the heart of the individual. 

Man's spiritual nature is the highest expression of 
his personality, and his religion is the atmosphere in 
which it flourishes best. That form of faith which 
makes a man the best citizen is the religion for him. 
It should help him to live in the atmosphere of the 
ideal, quickening him to compassion, filling him with 
a cheerful godliness and an unflinching faith in the fu- 
ture. 

It should broaden his outlook and enlarge his 
horizon. Only when it becomes confused with a 
warping and rigid sectarianism does a man's faith 
narrow him. There is a type of religion which makes 
a speciality of the morose and impales every simple 
human pleasure on the spear-point of an isolated text. 
This is not Christianity, but the base coin of some 
lesser currency. The religion taught by Christ does 
not offer us position or wealth, but opportunities of 
service, and in loyal service no man fails of his re- 
ward. It makes a sacrament of the lowly task, it 
lightens the dark corners of the road, and turns the 
wayside pools into rich wine. It breathes into the 
soul the spirit of charity; and of charity the world 
has sore need, for every man carries his own load, 
every woman her own burden, and the road is uphill. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE ADVENTURE OF DEATH 

" My task accomplished and the long day done, 
My wages taken, and in my heart 
Some late lark singing, 
Let me be gathered to the quiet west, 
The sundown splendid and serene, 
Death." 

W. E. Henley. Margaritce Sorori. 

With the gift of life there comes to all living crea- 
tures a desire to continue to live. Among human be- 
ings this desire is only lost when they are plunged 
in the abyss of despair, and can see no gleam of light 
on their horizon. The desire to live is keenest in the 
young, old enough to see the panorama of life un- 
folding before them. Its intensity is the measure of 
their vitality. But, by a singular paradox, it is the 
young who are most ready to risk and, if need be, 
sacrifice their lives for others. Youth is the age of 
the generous impulse; few men are miserly in the 
spring-time of their days. That warped trait of 
character, if it comes at all, develops at a period of 
life when neither wealth nor length of days can be 
enjoyed to the full. But youth lives in an atmosphere 
of high altruism, and is ready to put all it possesses 
to the hazard if opportunity arises or need ever calls. 
The desire to live is maintained all through life until 
old age, when in many cases it begins to abate, though 
some old people cling grudgingly to the last few 

grains of sand as they trickle through their weaken- 

223 



224 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ing fingers, and never develop what Metchnikoff called 
" the instinct for death." It is only when death is 
recognized as inevitable that the desire to live is taken 
from most of us. This is a wise provision, for it 
makes death easier for the dying. 

Life is a school of probation in which character is 
molded by experience and put to the test alike by 
joy and sorrow. But, for each of us, an hour comes 
in which we pass from the schoolroom of life through 
the portal of death into the unfathomable beyond. 
Death is no untoward accident, but as natural a phe- 
nomenon in the process of life as is the transference 
of a child at school from a lower to a higher class, 
when it has proved itself ready for the change. 

If we could only bring ourselves to recognize this 
we should clarify our vision, and dissipate that do- 
lorous fog with which superstition has beclouded the 
final act of life. 

Death is as much a part of living as life is. 

Elsewhere 1 I have endeavored to show that the 
fear of death is largely artificial; that the dying do 
not fear it when their hour comes ; and that the act of 
death is a painless transition. At the same time I 
tried to prove that we have reasonable ground for be- 
lieving that after death we go on. 

It is not my intention to deal at length with these 
matters once again lest I should involve myself in 
vain repetitions. But there are two points which may 
be emphasized. When we have succeeded in reducing 
the act of death to its true proportions we shall cease 
to dread it, and shall shrink from it as little as we do 
from the duties that lie before us to-morrow. Indeed, 
we may do more than that. Stayed and armed by our 
philosophy or our faith, we may look forward to it 

i The Adventure of Death, by R. W. Maekenna. 



THE ADVENTURE OF DEATH 225 

with intense but reverent expectancy, as the experi- 
ence which is to usher us on to new and more fruitful 
opportunities. Many a man and woman has passed 
on in that glad confidence. 

Many who believe in the doctrine of evolution find 
a difficulty in imagining that death does not ex- 
tinguish us. To me this seems an illogical abandon- 
ment of their principles. If the evolutionary hypoth- 
esis is true, as we have very cogent reason to be- 
lieve, man, as we know him, is the coping-stone of 
creative development in this world, built upon and 
from a foundation of lower forms of life. Man as a 
physical organism is a splendid product from such 
beginnings ; but man as a thinking, conscious, reason- 
able, and moral being is a more splendid creature 
still. Character or personality, as met with in man, 
is a higher evolution even than that degree of physical 
perfection to which he has attained. It is the coping- 
stone in human development. But the loftiest human 
personality falls short of the ideal, and must forever 
fall short, and evolution as applied to the psychical 
side of life be an empty delusion unless personality 
survives the transition through death to continue fur- 
ther evolution towards the perfect ideal when it is no 
longer hindered and encumbered by the body. 

However far reason or scientific knowledge may 
take us along the road of proof there comes a gap at 
the end which must be bridged over by an act of faith. 
For some the gap is so great as to be almost un- 
bridgeable. For others it is so narrow that they can 
almost reach a hand across it to their beloved. 

In all ages the seers and the poets, whose vision is 
clearer than that of ordinary men, have been the 
apostles of the belief in the immortality of man. It 
is a far cry from Homer and Hesiod to Tennyson 



226 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

and Robert Browning, but through all the centuries 
that have intervened the witness of the poets has been 
a clarion-call summoning men to see and know that 
they are not creatures of a moment, but immortal 
souls. 

" Plato, thou reasonest well. 
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 
This longing after immortality? 
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror 
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul 
Back on herself and startles at destruction? 
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 
'Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter, 
And intimates eternity to man." 



CHAPTER XVII 



THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE 



" If I stoop 
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp 
Close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late, 
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day." 

Browning. Paracelsus. 

The world is full of enigmas, and one of the greatest 
is life. We know neither what it is nor what its pur- 
poses may be, and we are perplexed by the mysteries 
which it enfolds. But the mysteries, and the diffi- 
culties, and the hard problems which it presents should 
impel us to seek earnestly for their solution rather 
than drive us into a backwater of indolent apathy. 
Half of life's allurement lies in its mysteries. If all 
the enigmas were removed it would be no more in- 
teresting than would be a game of chess in which every 
move is mapped out for them before the players sit 
down at the board. The existence of the human in- 
tellect demands the contemporaneous existence of 
mysteries — the knife needs the stone to whet it. 
Most thinking men will agree with Stopford Brooke, 
who said; "Few things produce more intellectual 
scorn in me than the impatience of the human race 
under enigmas. For my part, if life had no puzzle 
it would have no pleasure." 1 These are brave words, 
bravely spoken, but they do not help to elucidate the 
smallest of life's problems. 

In those moments of arrogant impatience that come 
to us all we are apt to imagine that, if the ruling of 

i Life and Letters of Stopford Brooke, by Lawrence Pearsall 
Jacks, vol. i. p. 234. 

227 



228 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the world and the destinies of man were committed to 
our care, we could correct many abuses and set many 
a wrong thing right. We would be tempted to abolish 
pain and suffering, to blot out with a stroke all moral 
evil, to correct everything which in our puny way we 
think requires amendment, to clear away all the mys- 
teries and make life ais plain as a simple arithmetical 
calculation. If such an opportunity were given us 
our achievement would fall far short of our ambition, 
and it is likely that our fellow-men would be as little 
satisfied with our world as we should be with any world 
controlled by them. It is a mighty task to run a 
Universe, and something far beyond the power of any 
man. Most of us find the ordering of our own little 
portion of life a task more than sufficient for our 
talents. Let us leave the Universe to God. 

But, dark and obscure though many of the prob- 
lems which beset us on our journey through life un- 
doubtedly are, they are not ^incapable of solution. 
Right at our feet, if we will grope and look, we may 
find a clew. Sometimes the clew is fine as gossamer, 
and now and then we lose it in the tangled and in- 
tricate maze of circumstances, but if we can grasp it 
and follow it we shall find that it grows stronger be- 
fore our eyes until it becomes a cable strong enough 
to lift us out of the quagmire of doubt — tenacious 
as Flanders' clay — and set us with firm feet upon the 
high road to knowledge. The clew has its origin in 
Law, it ends in Providence. 

We know how all the operations of Nature are con- 
ditioned by laws. No dewdrop falls out of the dark 
hand of night, no wave tramples with snow-white foot 
upon the shingle, no day breaks roseate upon the 
eastern horizon, nothing in the whole Universe moves, 
be it speck of dust or giant avalanche, except in obedi- 



THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE 

ence to natural laws. And what are natural laws? 
If we probe deeply enough we are forced to admit that 
they can be nothing else than the rules God has laid 
down for the regulation of His own acts. In this we 
have a demonstration of cosmic harmony. Man is a 
rational and intelligent being. A world in which 
caprice ruled instead of order, where season followed 
season in no regular succession but haphazard, where 
the sun and the moon and the tides obeyed no dis- 
coverable laws, but were the shuttlecocks of chance, 
would offer no field for the intelligent activities of 
man. Law in the Universe, reason in man: the two 
things are indissolubly linked together. Without the 
one, the other could not exist; without the latter, the 
former would be an unnecessary refinement. Part of 
man's life is lived in the physical world, and that part 
is never separable from the operations of law. And 
if we were not purblind we should see that all life is 
under law. The physical laws of nature are im- 
mutable; those other laws, as yet undeciphered and 
unknown, out of which spring all the enigmas and 
mysteries that perplex us, are equally unchangeable. 
The laws we have discovered and obey work to pro- 
mote our happiness. In making ourselves their slaves 
we become their masters. Our greatest freedom lies 
along the line of obedience. 

We suffer from breaches of the laws we already 
know; we suffer also for breaches of laws that are 
plainly written somewhere, but which as yet we have 
failed to decipher. This is a hard saying; but we 
dare not expect that fire should continue to possess 
its genial, heat-giving properties, without retaining 
the power of producing serious injury, until every 
child has learned that a flame will burn an inquisitive 
finger. 



230 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Some day perhaps, in the dim future, when man 
has risen to the full height of his destiny, the laws 
that are at present hidden from us will be found writ- 
ten in letters of blazing gold broad upon the fore- 
head of everything that is at present a mystery. Un- 
til that day dawns courage should be the duty of 
man, and faith his watchword, for no mystery ever 
yielded up its secret to cowardice, and no obstacle was 
ever surmounted without hope. 

Though life may be full of enigmas, perplexities, 
and puzzles, it is worth having in spite of them all. 
It is one of the tragedies of life, as well as one of 
its glories that none of us is asked if he will take it. 
It is a gift thrust upon us which we may not bury in 
a napkin, but which we must use. We may use it 
selfishly and make of it a desolate thing, or we may 
spend it in the service of others and cause it to blos- 
som like the rose. But one thing we may not do. 
We dare not play the coward with it. If it comes to 
us laden with heavy burdens it is our duty to take it 
up cheerfully, and with a quiet and confident courage 
turn our face to the sun and set bravely out upon 
our way. The best lives are the burdened lives, if 
the load is not allowed to crush the spirit. 

The world offers but few smooth roads to the trav- 
eler, and the level road is rarely worth while. The 
joy of overcoming the rough place is more than re- 
ward for the struggle. The Son of Man had blood 
upon His brow, but His feet were bruised as well. 
Few men are worthy to wear the crown of thorns, 
but the bleeding feet are a sign that we have not 
shrunk from the hard path, and along the hard path 
lie the best vantage points for seeing the City Beau- 
tiful. The roads in the valley are easy, and shel- 
tered, and one may travel along them in a bath-chair; 



THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE 2S1 

only the rugged heights fling a challenge to man's 
soul, and only among their peaks floats the atmos- 
phere in which his soul can rise to its true height. 
For life is no base and despicable thing, to be crawled 
through on our hands and knees, but a high adventure, 
to which we must answer on our feet, erect and proud. 
And if the way takes us over unfathomable gorges of 
doubt and despair, and leads us along the precipitous 
cliff-edges of mystery, there is no need for faintness 
of heart. Press on! The law of struggle is a law 
of life, and though struggle may mean pain and con- 
flict, it has within it the seeds of victory. 

What the purpose of life may be we cannot tell, 
but that it has a purpose we dare not doubt. It is 
such a little thing, only a span long, a mere atom in 
the immensities of infinite time and space, that it is 
hard to believe it can have anything but an infini- 
tesimal significance. Yet without human life, and the 
mind which finds its vehicle in life, much in Nature and 
creation would be ineffectual pomp. Mind is at once 
the aim and elevator of life, and the goal of mind is 
God. But the finite cannot comprehend the infinite 
even though it looks with the eye of faith. 

In the kingdom of the insects there are creatures 
whose whole life is bounded by the confines of a single 
day. They are known as the ephemerce, and, born 
with the dawn, they live their little lives in the summer 
sunlight, hand on the heritage of life to others of 
their kind, and die when the night falls. One can 
imagine such an insect, hoary with all the hours of her 
brief life, gathering her children and her children's 
children round her dying bed, some broad-veined leaf, 
and seeking to make them wise with the fruits of all 
the philosophy she has gathered in the course of her 
long pilgrimage. Doubtless she can tell them how, in 






THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the remote past, when she was a child, there was a 
mighty storm of wind and flood — some May vesper 
commingled with a shower of summer rain; and how, 
in the days of her youth, she narrowly escaped the 
voracious beak of some questing bird; and how, in the 
first flush of maturity, love came to her; and so on, 
through the whole gamut of her life's experiences. 
And, if she is an insect given to philosophize, we can 
imagine her pouring forth, for the benefit and guid- 
ance of her descendants, the cornucopia of her 
thoughts upon the world in which she has lived, and 
all its problems. The picture provokes a smile; but, 
in smiling, we are laughing at ourselves. Compared 
with the few brief hours of the life of an ephemera, 
our span of threescore years and ten seems an 
eternity. But the longest human life, and the most 
gifted human intellect, measured by the standard of 
infinite time and the infinite knowledge of the eternal 
Mind, are less in comparison than the length of life 
and the intelligence of the garrulous ephemera. So 
let us walk humbly, holding fast to whatever clews we 
may discover, straining with eyes of faith into the 
darkness, confident that some day and somewhere the 
clouds will be sundered by the light-bringing sword 
of dawn. 

Within sight of the little bell-tent in which these 
chapters have been written stands a great city. Its 
streets are thronged by soldiers from all ends of the 
earth, for the curse of war is upon it. On the wine- 
dark sea, which washes its feet, war-craft come and 
go, and the drone of the humming aeroplanes fills the 
blue vault of the sky above it. In its streets vice 
walks openly and unashamed, and women, in whose 
eyes the pure light of heaven should gleam, leer evilly 
at men, at once their betrayers and their victims. 



THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE 

Lust and crime, sin and death, lurk in its alleys and 
by-ways. Nearer at hand, in long and serried rows, 
stands a tented hospital, where men, young and mid- 
dle-aged, rich and poor, black and white, are suffer- 
ing and dying to satisfy the blood-lust of the god of 
War. But, above all this vice-ridden and tortured 
city, over all the muddle, the filth, the folly, the base- 
ness and inhumanity of man, there towers a symbol 
of the Divine. I know not by whose hand, or by what 
pious inspiration it has come to pass, but high on an 
eminence above the city is a church, and on its loftiest 
pinnacle there stands a gigantic, golden figure of the 
Holy Mother and the Divine Child. Far out on the 
deep the effulgent symbol may be seen by the harassed 
but home-coming mariner, and out of the mire of the 
city streets, if one lift one's eyes, it is always visible. 
This is the vision splendid; a perpetual witness to re- 
mind us that, though man make a mess of life and by 
the misuse of his talents and opportunities bring suf- 
fering and evil upon the earth, over all and above all 
there still reigns triumphant — God. 



THE END 



PBINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA 



'HE following pages contain advertisements of a few 
of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects. 



TWO FORTHCOMING NOVELS 



Mary Olivier 



By MAY SINCLAIR 

Author of "The Tree of Heaven," etc. 

Cloth, T2mo. 

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From Father to Son 



By MARY S. WATTS 

Author of "Nathan Burke," "The Rise of Jennie dishing," 
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Flaming Crucible : 

The Faith of the Fighting Men 

By ANDRE FRIBOURG 

Cloth, 12° , $1.50 

Under the title Croire, this autobiography of a French infan- 
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Aveime New York 



EDEN PHILLPOTTS' NEW NOVEL 



Storm in a Teacup 



By EDEN PHILLPOTTS 

Author of "The Spinners," "Old Delabole," "Brunei's Tower," 

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Ready shortly 

This carries on Mr. Phillpotts' series of novels dealing with the 
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The elopement, it might be explained, was purely a nominal 
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PHILLPOTTS RECENT NOVEL 



The Spinners 



Cloth, 12°, $1.60 



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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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In the Heart of a Fool 

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